A Worm's Eye View

I didn't know a dew worm could sweep, nor did I care. Worms had always been for picking, as free bait for fishing but this one, this big one, did like I did in the mist after the rainstorm. It poked his head out of his house, a hole in the ground, just as I poked my head out of the house, to look and smell the air.

I silently sat on the front steps and watched this eyeless creature as my own eyes grew wider. It stretched, like a cat would when waking up, and kept its tail end inside the hole but stretch it did and it started to gather pieces of dead leaves and old grass with a sweeping curling motion of its body, pulling all the little wet loose debris towards its hole. He wasn't sweeping away, he was sweeping in.

I sat dumbstruck and watched even more intently this rhythmic dance by an armless, legless creature collecting and somehow pulling into its hole some organic matter. What was I seeing? What was going on? And all in one fell swoop, what didn't matter to me before mattered now. This dew worm left an inverted pyramid of organic matter sticking partly out of its worm hole. I guess it couldn't suck it all in.

I had never seen this before nor did I know what was happening but the next morning as I walked on the edge of our property, under some trees, I noticed more of those inverted pyramids with old decomposing leaves sticking out. I got down on one knee and gently pulled on one tuft and out it came, leaving a bare opening in the ground. I lifted another and another and started noticing these all over the forest floor and I noticed something else: worm manure - worm castings surrounding those openings in the earth. Worms have outside toilets.

I couldn't help myself and I picked some and crushed it between my fingers and looked at it. It was dry, it looked like earth, I sniffed it and it smelled like earth, I taste... no I didn't but I was so curious about all these leaves all over the forest floor that were decomposing. They were later collected and brought underground and the result was that worm manure was deposited on the floor of the forest and the forest looked healthy. And I thought about all the worms in the world and how there were thousands of tons of manure daily and how these worms were like farmers of the earth, keepers of the forest in their own way and I was impressed.

Later I read that worm castings are the perfect medium for growing plants and that this was even sold in bags to gardeners and flower growers because it had a balanced ph and never burned plants. Organic farmers they are, organic farmers working with or without us to keep this earth healthy.

I don't fish with worms any more and if I see any on the sidewalk or on the street after a rain I pick them up and throw them onto some grass where they can do what they are supposed to do.

Now, when I see a particularly beautiful scene in nature, I can't help thinking about worms.

How strange is that!