The Return of the Moth-Mand

The Patriots have their Elvis, the Celtics their leprechaun, my mascot is the moth.
I’m not sure which moth, which genus, but I think you know the one. The creature that’s supposed to be long-dead, especially this far into the wintry weather, but is still there, clinging onto the clapboards, ready to sneak in, to bask in the warmth and dance in the excess wattage, whenever anybody leaves the door open just a few seconds too long.

‘Shut the door, you’re letting the moths in’.

That’s a familiar refrain around our house.
Is it just us or, as I suspect, are there quite a few of you experiencing this phenomena this winter?
Usually, I think, these pesky, non-descript, blandly brown little winged critters are gone after the first frost.
I don’t think there was anything out of the ordinary this fall. I don’t remember the summer as being particularly hot, or humid.
But for some reason these otherwise uninteresting specimens are showing unusual hardiness.
Or maybe I am projecting.
Projecting: that’s a psychological term I learned back in tenth grade, a millennium ago. It means, basically, seeing things the way you want them to be.
I perceive these brown spitballs with wings as particularly hardy this year, because that’s what I want to be.
A survivor.
My little blue species is supposed to have been frozen out of existence long ago.
I have been barely hanging on, clinging to the door and to the fading belief that the light is getting stronger, the climate warmer.
In my delirious state I often fantasize that I have made it inside and found an enormous wool coat that, tiny bite by tiny bite, I consume it it’s entirety.
A wool coat, or as Dick Nixon said in his famous Checker’s speech, ‘a respectable Republican cloth coat’.
But when the wind blows and threatens to rip me off the wall where I am clinging I wake up to the truth that the odds are against me.
I should be long gone by now.
This climate is not conducive to the health of my kind.
Wool or cloth is, however tasty, without any nutritional value whatsoever.

You’ve got to give these little guys credit.
Did you ever flick at a moth clinging to the wall, and have them just turn to dust? Man, that is dedication to a cause.
It’s like a science fiction film: the prehistoric creature fights with every ounce of energy to escape its fate and -- millions of years later, is discovered where it made its last stand: a pile of petrified bones and footprints in the dirt.
Right up to the end they were carrying on.
That’s how it feels sometimes, to be a liberal.
I’m flying on fumes.
I’m held together by wire and wax.
Extinction is just around the corner.
But if the door opens just a crack, and the thinnest spear of light slips out, miraculously my wings come to life.

Lately, perhaps, there seem to have been more than a few ‘chinks’ of light, more than a few glimpses of the warm, well lit world inside the big house.
Is it the light at the end of the tunnel?
Maybe, maybe not.
But even a few reluctant admissions about Iraq, a handful of plea bargains from corrupt lobbyists, and a dollop of outrage that our Homeland Security turns out to mean that the government is spying on you in your home - even these scraps of light are enough to keep up my strength, allow me to hold on a little longer.
On these intermittent flashes I have made my way from the scrub oaks in the front yard, to the steps, to the door, and inside onto the wall.
I am lying low here, my wings folded tightly, barely a splinter of brown on a beige wall, above eye level.
Out of sight, out of mind.
If I can just stay here, undisturbed, for a few days, maybe weeks, I can regain my full strength and take on bigger challenges, take bigger bites out of the wooly mammoths of this new age of conservatism.
For now though, I have to conserve my energy.
For now, I have to rest my wings.
.
Keep your front door shut, the lights off, the closet closed.
Beware the Moths of Spring!