Ladybugs


    I lived in the preschool I went to. My family and I were between houses, so we lived in the small apartment space above the school for three months. Hobby Horse, as it was called for the giant paper cut-out rocking horses we made annually, was across the street from the old race track, so the noise level reached such an altitude most days that we could barely hear our own conversations in the small annex. It's funny to think that both of those things existed because since the mid 90's the school was torn down and the race track was replaced by a Wal Mart and accompanying strip mall.
    I was sitting in my room one hot, almost school-calendar summer night, and I was creating a living space for a few ladybugs I had found.  I was using pink plastic teacups and small saucers of water, but I felt like I needed leaves for their home. I asked my father, who went downstairs to the porch, leaned over the railing to pluck a few from the a hanging plant or a nearby tree; I can't remember which, but he lost his balance and fell headfirst into the bushes below.

    I woke up on Adam's dog hair-covered living room couch one morning, and there was a ladybug on me. It fell out of my hair and crawled along my collarbone.

    Sometimes in the summer before college, I went to work with my mother in Frenchtown. She's a seamstress for a placed called Nelson Bridge, which is run by a divorced couple who have too much money to know what to do with it. Nelson Bridge does home draperies and furnishings for a few clients and their handful of mansions, and recently they've expanded to run an over-priced vintage clothing store. They hired a woman to write a blog about their business, and she makes more money an hour than my mother does sewing in the workroom all day.
    One overcast morning, I walked past the barbershop to the cafe around the corner and got a coffee. I sat outside until a man yelled at me from a few painted picnic tables away and told me I couldn't smoke here. I had asked the woman last week if it was alright, and she said yes, just sit farthest away from the door. I had complied, and told the man "I checked. It's alright."
    He gave me a look, one that reprimanded my entire generation of lazy, unapologetic kids, so I left to walk across the bridge the spans the Delaware. Halfway across I found a ladybug clinging to the railing, brightly colored against the gray bridge and sky, so I picked her up and carried her back to the Frenchtown side. I placed her in a flower by the river.