Measuring the Marigolds by George Merrill

Whether they’re measuring marigolds, adding or subtracting or just hanging by a thread, I think inchworms are really neat. Whenever I can, I watch them tirelessly. Even as a boy they intrigued me as they walked along my finger.

In the last few days, the weather has suddenly become seriously summerlike, with temperatures reaching into the upper eighties. While walking to the car one inchworm landed on my head (Being legally bald, I feel anything touching it.) He’d been hanging by a thread. When I reached the car I saw another making his way along the hood. The sum of inchworms I saw was adding up to totals I could reckon in feet: they were everywhere.

The inchworm has a distinct style of mobility. Since he (she as well) possesses legs only at the front and at the back of the torso – none in the middle – inchworms always seem to have an arch in their back. I would think that might provoke orthopedic problems if he had any kind of exoskeleton or skeleton. He has neither. No problem. So while traveling on a solid surface, or climbing his web, he easily places his head as far forward as possible and then quite literally, brings up the rear, making a prominent arch in his back.

It’s strange the things we remember. I can actually recall the first inchworm I ever saw. I was under a strand of trees near a pond and the sunlight was shining toward me. The sunlight flickered, caused by swaying tree leaves, and it created an illusion: at one glance, the inchworm appeared to be suspended in mid air as if he’d discovered the art of weightlessness. Then as the light shifted, he appeared to be shimmying up a silver thread on which he hung like a green pendant. The sight enchanted me.

I tease my wife Jo about how she can be entertained by the most insignificant kinds of things the way I am with inchworms. In restaurants, she might remove the paper sleeve covering a straw, crinkle it up, wet it with a drop of water, and then watch as it wiggles across the table, not exactly like an inchworm, but close enough to make me think of one. I’ll say something cute like, “Well, you’re a cheap date, I’ll give you that” or “It’s great you’re so easily entertained.” She’ll ignore me.

An old saying has it: “What goes around comes around.” It doesn’t always, fortunately for me.

We were out on the porch the other evening. The sun would soon set and we were enjoying the remains of a lovely day. To the right of where we sat, on the very top of a black wrought iron chair, an inchworm was making his way along. The coal black of the chair, set off his green color in sharp relief, as if his little journey was being showcased for the world to see. I brought Jo’s attention to it and instead of doing unto me, as I had unto her –making some wisecrack – she got into watching the inchworm with me. I felt a slight sense of shame given her more magnanimous response that accommodated to my interest in inchworms.

Watching the inchworm this time around, I found it was how the inchworm brought up his rear that intrigued me the most; as if he was either always getting ahead of himself or trying to catch up. My thought is not as fanciful as it may first seem.

The inchworm’s maneuver is a perfect metaphor for how I have lived much of life.

Over the years, I was confident that I had a firm grasp on the nature of life situations. I’m a thoughtful man. In significant ways I’ve lived a little like the inchworm travels – placing my head way out there in front of me and only later, when certain realties force themselves on me, haul the rest of me along or, like the inchworm, bring up the rear. It’s always sobering. The revelations that our diminishments impose, as the saying goes, can be a kick in the pants.

In this regard, injuring my knee recently has been instructive. I now bump along like an inchworm.

Hobbling about with a cane has not called forth my better nature. I’ve become irritable and testy (more than usual). It’s because this diminishment has highlighted yet another deficiency I suffer. I have lived with this one for most of my life. I am constitutionally unable to set out from one room, go to another to retrieve some items that I don’t, upon returning to the room I left, discover I’ve forgotten at least one of the items I was after. What most folks accomplish in one trip takes me two.

Given my present circumstances, that second trip, once routine, now comes at a price: I hurts like blazes and I feel as if I’m bumping along like an inchworm, but not with the deliberate grace with which they move.

I have now and even greater affinity with inchworms. Like me, they can’t get from here to there without bumping along. They’ve some how learned to be OK with that. Instead of grousing about it the way I do and wishing I was a rabbit or a race horse or in my case, years younger, they make their strides slow and easy, while taking the time along the way to measure the marigolds.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.