Beginner Child and The Larva

These larva, nothing like what landed on my hand,
or on Beginner Child's bed, make pretty little cases
for themselves out of tiny pebbles.  Fashionista Larva.

While at my desk, playing Staries, a computer game I am currently addicted to, I felt something on my hand. Thinking my hand was just getting those first twinges of mouse overuse, I ignored it. I did shoot a look down and saw something moving on top of my hand. Ewww, it was some sort of laaarrrvaaa. Twisting, squirming in all its “larvaness.” I flicked it off onto the desk and smashed its little beginning life out. Damn, now I don’t know what it could have been, meaning: What kind of larva was it? Did it fall from the ceiling (termite)? Did the cat in my lap bring it in? Or is it the spawn from something living, unseen, in my office? 

I’m not seeing any on top of my desk. Did the thing bounce off my head, landing fatefully on my hand? Have others landed on my head, getting trapped in my hair? And why when I think of squirming things, do I flit back to the incident many years ago starring Beginner Child and “the larvae”?  

Beginner Child was around twelve years old and we were living in a house with open beam ceilings. Beginner Child had shelves above his bed filled with books, treasures, the sort of stuff most twelve year olds have. The top shelf was too high for him, so was unused. He was a fairly neat child, but wouldn’t always make his bed in the morning.  Sometimes I would make it for him, hoping that seeing his bed neat and orderly would inspire him to keep it that way.  

I came into Beginner Child’s room to put away some washed clothes and noticed some squirming things on his bedspread. They seemed to be in a line. Strange. I swept them up and looked up to the ceiling. There was a beam straight above the bed. I thought that what I was seeing was evidence of termites. Note, I didn’t have a tremendous amount of termite identification experience back then.

I checked on Beginner Child’s bedspread that night. Again, a few more larva-ish things were squirming on top of the spread, and in the same exact place-almost in a line. Okay, time to alert Himself, who was a part of my life then.  

Himself looked at the squirmers and looked up at the ceiling beam, “I don’t think those are termites.”

“Well, what are they then?” I like to further my education on all subjects whenever possible.

“I don’t know, let’s just keep checking and see if they stop showing up.”  I have since learned that this is the coping manner of Himself when he doesn’t want to deal with something right away.

Beginner Child came home late and went right to bed. I forgot about the larva until the next day. I made up his bed that morning. By that night, again we found larva in the same spot on the spread.

“We need to deal with these termites right away, this is gross.” I had seen enough and wanted it to stop. Thinking of how many might have fallen on top of Beginner Child in his sleep was very disturbing. Himself agreed we would do further investigation while Beginner Child was away that weekend.

Beginner Child left that evening to visit his dad. Beginner Husband had by this time acquired an “X” in front of his description. XBH moved many hours away and visitations were few: holidays and three-day weekends.  This was a three-day weekend, and so the bed stayed made up. 

Before Beginner Child returned home, I checked his bed for larva (this sentence is so wrong!), removed a few, while muttering to myself “this is ridiculous.” Looking around the room, I saw it could use some dusting. I began dusting the lower shelf above his bed, thankful there wasn’t any larvae on them.  Then, standing on the bed, reaching up as high as I could to dust the top shelf, my hand felt something weird, something outdoorsy.  

I felt around some more and grabbed a bird’s nest off the top shelf.  What the hell?  Where did this come from?  It wasn’t as if a bird had made it all the way into his room and nested without us noticing. 

Old bird nests, in their natural, abandoned state, are not at all like the sterile fake bird nests you see in home decor shops. Nope, they are actually dirty, with old down feathers from hatchlings and such.  That would be the condition of a typical nest, except in the nest I was holding in my hand that fateful day of dusting.  That particular nest had the usual downy feathers clinging onto the twigs, along with something organic stuck in some feathers at the bottom of the nest.  Turning over the nest, I dislodged a bunch of squiggly maggots, which fell onto the spread.  The bottom of the nest was infested with them.

I don’t know what the maggots were still living on.  The bottom of the nest had bits of something that looked like it had oozed down through from the inside.  I yelled for Himself to come see what I had found.  Being taller, he could see the entire upper shelf.  

Himself looked down at the nest I was still holding, then up to the shelf.  Standing on the bed, and looking eye level at the shelf, he announced that there were no other nests, but there were maggots squirming and rolling around on the shelf underneath where the nest used to be. In fact, they were rolling right off the shelf and landing on the spread below as he said this. 

I handed him the paper towels and cleaner. Lucky for me, Himself was the only one tall enough to do the job right.

We weren’t dealing with termites, we were dealing with live maggots living off of whatever had been in that nest.  Maggots that had been up there for who knows how long, rolling off the shelf for a week or so, landing on the spread, landing on...  

When Beginner Child returned from his visit with XBH, we told him about finding the bird nest.  

“Oh, I forgot all about it.”  He was very happy we had found it.  

“Where did it come from?”  

“I found it on the ground under the trees by the driveway.”  Oh, good he didn’t remove an inhabited nest.

“Was there anything in the nest?”

“There was a baby bird in it, but I checked and it was dead.”

Oh.