📿 The Homing Instinct of Creatures Like Us

Autumnal thoughts on beauty and impermanence

🎧 YOU CAN LISTEN TO ME READ THIS ESSAY, ABOVE.

Hello you— Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry,

On a day like today- end of October in New England, 75° with a medium breeze- I feel the only reasonable way to respect my life is to ditch my understanding of what needs to get done this afternoon in favor of laying belly down in the grass.

It’s the last of these days before the winter sets in. The winter of course has its own charm— especially in the country. The natural light sharpens into overexposure, shadows are long, and the landscape is brittle and sparse as a wafer. But in the New England states, autumn is famous for a reason. The air is spiced by apples turning to vinegar in the fields, and growing things that are dying back radiate a honeyed glow.  If it’s true that summer leaves turn green from drinking in the energy of the sun, then the autumn leaves are energetically drunk to the point of becoming a reflection of the sun itself. 

This is our fourth autumn in our house and a strange occurrence happens every year on the last warm days of October. The Eastern facing side of our white two-story is painted by the presence of hundreds of beetles, all skimming the wood siding trying to find a way in. They cluster in droves, creating shapes like the splotches of a Pollack painting, working in what I perceive to be organized collaboration as they seek out survival for the winter. 

I gaze at our siding and wonder “Why our house? Do the beetles have some sort of homing instinct? Is our house their ancestral shelter?” I imagine the small Dutch family, who built our home out of pine and horse hair, inviting these beetles to nest in the walls approximately 300 generations of beetles ago. We’ve simply inherited the tradition of living with the beetles that manage to find their way into our walls. I picture a soft layer of beetles all huddled for warmth creating an extra layer of insulation around our home each winter. This makes me feel sweet towards them, our winter companions, engaged in human-to-insect mutual aid. 

We haven’t been visited by this annual flock yet  — which means that there is at least one more warm day to come. I take comfort in this way of noting the season and predicting the weather as a I twirl a leaf between my thumb and my forefinger. I wonder how many more days like this I actually have left to receive. If the beetles are as predictable as they’ve been in the past, then I likely have between 1 and 280-ish days of my life that are warm and breezy at the end of October. This is less than a year’s worth of days like this one that I’ll ever have the chance to experience. So few. 

One could say this is a morbid thought. One could also say that the word “morbid” was created by someone so out of touch with life that they sought to pathologize death. I personally say it’s a realistic thought and in touch with the fleeting miracle. I wonder if recognizing impermanence is always a precondition for appreciating beauty? I let my thoughts evaporate all together in the warm sun that’s taken over the sensation of my body lying belly down in the grass. 

There’s some consideration of how much time has passed like this, but honestly, not much consideration at all. I only think of time when my hand flicks compulsively to reach for my phone, as though it has a homing instinct of it’s own, trying to find it’s way in like the beetles searching for cracks in the wood siding. What is my hand trying to find it’s way into though? The familiar apps? The feeling of parasocial connection? The hit of dopamine or urgency or importance that I get when I scroll through my email or social media? I urge my fingers to touch the grass instead: matted into thick braids beneath the leaves, fading to the color of straw.