The Inchworm Knows What Time of Year It Is

My five year old son came running up to me today, his face grubby with dirt and shining with wonder.”Look, Mommy, Look! Look what I found crawling on me.”

In his carefully cupped hands he held an emerald green inchworm.

I nodded and told him, as hundreds of generations of mothers have before me, “It means you will be getting new clothes. That’s an inchworm and she is measuring you for a new set of clothes.”

He didn’t much care. All he cared about was that he had a cool, bright green caterpillar that crawled around in a funky way.

The funny thing is that the little inchworm was right. My son is getting a new set of clothes this week (a few actually). He starts kindergarten in just a few weeks. *sigh* Mothers are so glad and so sad to see these events come.

I didn’t know too much about our little harbinger of scholastic days to come so I thought I would look it up. Our little inchworm is actually a “Geometer Moth” caterpillar. I couldn’t pin down the exact species though. There are a million sites with pictures of the moths and precious few that have correctly identified pictures of the caterpillars. As frustrating as this is for me, it is not surprising. The Geometridae family of moths contains over 26,000 species. No butterfly collector could know them all.

But I shot a little bit of the measuring action of our little seamstress and put it up on YouTube (the video above) so you could see how they move and how they came to be called inchworms.

It’s not fair. Little caterpillars from my garden are not suppose to come and remind me of life. Life does that very well on its own, thank you very much.

5 thoughts on “The Inchworm Knows What Time of Year It Is
  1. Judith on

    I love that you sometimes have video on your blog. And, I didn’t know that tradition about the inchworm measuring for a set of new clothes. Bittersweet that in this case the little guy was measuring for the first set of school clothes for your own little guy.

    P.S. You mentioned in a comment on my blog about “Voices.” Did you mean GardenVoices at GardenWeb, or some other?

  2. Hanna on

    I thought I had been to your site before from there. But now that I look, I don’t see you on the list.

    I know I had been to your site before a few times. I recognized it. And since I really only go to garden blogs through my blogroll and Voices, I thought I had gotten there from Voices. Hmmm… Maybe you were on my blogroll and I accidentally deleted your site. My appologies if this is the case.

  3. Angel on

    I’ve never heard that about the clothes. I’ll have to remember that.

  4. Judith on

    Thanks, Hanna. No apologies, please. And anyway, I’m glad I did find GardenVoices as a result.

  5. Kasmira on

    Thanks for the youtube insert. I didn’t know that could be done! You inspired me and I posted my own short video of my cats on <a href=”http://www.wawasworld.blogspot.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Wawa’s World </a>today.

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