What is on my ceiling? Looks like a thumbprint—gray, like newsprint. Except… my kitchen ceiling is the cottage cheese type. A thumbprint isn’t possible.
In the back of my mind was a recent dinner party, at which a bottle of zinfandel misbehaved or, rather, its cork did, and red splattered the ceiling. But not there. And anyway, I cleaned it all, didn’t I? Could this have been a remnant? I couldn’t imagine what caused the gray smudge. I made a mental note to clean it somehow.
Next day, having forgotten all about it, I did a double take. Was it that large yesterday? Looks like two thumbprints today. I got up on a ladder and looked through a magnifying glass.
Oh, it’s a dusting of something. Mold? In the desert? I rubbed my finger across the spot. Wait a minute, use the high-power portion of the glass. Yikes! Are those microscopic heads? They’re moving! They’re alive.
I got a camera and snapped a macro photo, having much trouble focusing while wavering on the ladder. I sent the photo off to Uncle Lenny. Handy to have an entomologist in the family. Lenny always responds right away, but he must have been teaching a class.
“You know I’m not the hysterical type,” I wrote him hours later, “but now that I know there are critters multiplying on my ceiling, right over my head in fact, I can’t think of much else.”
“It was likely a single egg sac that hatched. Chances are they’ll die anyway since there’s nothing to eat.”
A mist of diluted bleach took care of them. But what were they? Caterpillars, Lenny said. Probably laid by a moth.
Right. I leave the doors and windows open and we always have moths fluttering around. A moth laid an egg sac on my kitchen ceiling. I had caterpillar hatchlings. Cute.
Yuck yuck yuck! Can you imagine how Karen would freak out! And stay off ladders! Bob is so tall he could reach those creepy crawlers with no help at all.
Creepy! Those critters don’t care much about subtleties like gravity, do they? Creepy awesome pic.