Silkworms

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This story begins with a little girl, a girl who, while her friends collected fuzzy bagworms on a dusty Oklahoma playground and put them into cute jars and tried to feed them grass, cowered in a corner, horrified. This girl can't tell you where or when or how it developed, but she suffered from a blinding fear of caterpillars. They haunted her waking and sleeping hours, covering floors with their writhing bodies in her nightmares, seeking her out like heat-guided missiles on family picnics, making her humiliate her coming-of-age self as she ran and screamed like a maniac to escape them.

This little girl grew up, and in the process outgrew many things, but not this phobia. "Sarah, they can't hurt you!" her friends would say. "Sarah, they're cute! Sarah, they turn into butterflies!" But reasoning means nothing to a very scared person. Just ask the girl's sister. She deals with crazy people all the time.

So despite this phobic handicap, the girl persevered through life, even doing the very scary thing of packing her bags and moving to a country no one, including herself, had heard of. There, she had adventures and met amazing people and ate strange foods and did many other erstwhile scary things, so much so that she became inflated with a sense of confidence and daring. The end of her time approached, and she couldn't help but think, "Now that wasn't so bad at all."

Imagine, then, the sudden horror she felt when, on an innocent enough visit to a student's family in a rural village, said student looked up and asked, after painstakingly typing some words into her electronic dictionary, "Miss Sarah, have you ever seen...grubs?"

"Grubs?" the girl asked with wrinkled brow.

Tippity-tap-tap, went the student's fingers. "Or...another word...caterpillar?"

"Yes," replied Sarah, perhaps too firmly.

"Would you like to go my sister's house?" Sarah did not want to ask the connection between the sister's house and grubs. As it turned out, she didn't have to. "She raise...how do you say...like grubs, they make the silk."

Ah. Silkworms. Her sisters raises silkworms. Of course. It's common in this part of the world, because silkworms eat mulberry leaves, because there's lots of mulberry trees, they pick the leaves and feed them to the writhing, squirming, disgusting silkworms...oh God help me how am I going to get out of this...

All this flashed through the girl's mind in a matter of seconds. Also in a matter of seconds, a decision was made, almost unconsciously, and the girl surprised herself by answering, "Yes, I would love to go to your sister's house and see a room full of silkworms."

And so they set off. The girl walked like one condemned, following behind the chattering student, down the street, into the courtyard, this is my sister, "yaksheme siz?", what a lovely house, the silkworms are in the cowshed, let's go there now, oh God save me.

Maybe they're in boxes, thought the girl. Yes, of course, hidden in boxes, covered with a fine wire mesh to keep them from escaping. Of course they are.

But they aren't, at least not in this village in Tajikistan. One solitary, swinging light bulb lit up an earth-walled room, where crunchy piles of mulberry leaves hid hundreds--hundreds--of writhing white silkworms and their pure white chrysalises. There was a moment, at the door, where the girl wasn't sure she could do it. This was her room 101, the place she knew when reading 1984 that she would turn everyone she ever knew over to the torturers, just don't let the caterpillars get me.

But in she went. The first thing she noticed was the sound. There was a faint rustling, to her ears an ear-splitting roar: they were moving, all around her, chomping away at the mulberry leaves. Her student's little niece proudly grabbed a smooth white creature, all dimpled and leggy, and held it out to the girl to touch. Instead of reeling back in horror, the girl calmly shook her head no, and then bent to take a photograph. At that moment, she knew, everything would be OK.

The girl returned from this village with a strange lightheadedness, a buoyancy, like one who has looked the devil in the face and come away to tell about it, for what could be worse than the devil? The girl now feels that she can do almost anything: she can run into the street in this strange land and scream, "Ladies, unite! Men are neither smarter nor stronger than you!" She can call all the people she's hurt in her life and apologize. She can eat escargot, swim with a jellyfish, return to work in Metro Nashville Public Schools. Certainly the girl will meet scary things in the future. Certainly there will be doors she almost can't walk through and deathlike marches to places she doesn't want to go. But somehow, they don't seem so bad now.

There are two silkworm pupae now sitting on her Tajik windowsill, a gift from her student. What will happen to them, she doesn't know. But it is strange even to her how she checks them every few minutes to make sure no ants are getting anywhere near them and ruthlessly kills any who do. No one's gonna hurt her silkworms.

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Photos

My Worst Nightmare
That is not my arm. But that is a caterpillar on this brave lady's arm.

Chrysalis
They boil these in water to clean and separate the fibers, from which comes silk.

Outside
You are so cute, I'm sorry I couldn't take the caterpillar from you, but that's just a little too much right now.