How taxing it is. |
Raising worms can be tough because, when they look at you, you can feel guilty. They look at you with those little round faces and those sad eyes and that does it. They have a way about them--I think they know what they are doing, encouraging guilt and sympathy the way earthworms do. It’s like, Are we the last ones left alive? They want brothers, sisters, kin to bump and push and slither with under the soil and in the silt-laced sand. Their little eyes plead for camaraderie, for a place in the sun. Instead, they inch under the weight of clay, beneath the oppressive silt-strewn peat and moist moss with no one to tote their banner, with no advocate to champion earthworm rights. I see it in their faces, I hear it in their plaintive pleas at night when I’m relaxed on the sofa watching whatever and they are, supposedly, bedded down for the evening beyond their glass habitat, within the nutrient rich earthen environment applicable to wormy wants and needs. And so I check on them one last time with guilt running like a river in my veins. I smile and make like everything will be fine and they of course give me that appeasing look but I know what they’re really feeling and so the guilt river runs even faster and splashes cold along the inner banks of shiver-sorrow that I eventually take to bed in tossing and turning. This goes on day after day. The weight of the world raising worms. They have ways, innocent yet so effective. Stress is diminishing--O I just can’t pretend! They’re practiced in their art; I wait on worms. 40 Lines Writer’s Cramp August 17, 2014 |