Aug 21, 2014 4 min read

All summer long, while cleaning and organizing the house, I would come across pairs of nail clippers. They were always where they didn’t belong: behind a picture frame on the piano, in the pencil cup on my desk, wedged between a couple of books on the shelf, under a sofa cushion – places like that. And since I was always in the middle of putting something else in its rightful place, I never stopped to move the clippers to a logical place, such as the bathroom drawer.

What does this have to do with my daughter’s ninth-grade science project? Plenty.

Grace has to show up the first day of school with a collection of at least 15 insects, taken alive and then preserved in either the freezer or a jar of rubbing alcohol. Naturally, we found out about this six days before the start of school. (Actually, I should have known, because my son went through this when he started ninth grade. But I’m so scattered, I stashed the nail clippers on the piano. So how was I supposed to remember the bug jar?)

And so, Grace and I went on a bug safari. It was not going well. After a good 20 minutes in our garden, yard and the weedy area behind the garage, we came up with exactly one lethargic lightning bug.

Now, I’ve been out working in the yard all summer, and for every weed I pulled, I would have to smack one ugly bug from my arm or knee. They were everywhere, lurking on leaves and crawling out of little holes in the ground and struggling to get out of spider webs in the window wells.

Where were they now? Like those nail clippers, they only show up when you don’t really need them. But get a hangnail, and they run and hide.

In the middle of this frustration, we visited my parents to deliver some of the tomatoes from our (annoyingly bug-free) garden.

“Poppy, do you have any bugs?” asked Grace.

In true Poppy fashion, he was ready to hook us up. He led us to the shed at the back of his yard.

“Be ready when I open the door,” he said. True enough, he pulled open the wooden doors and there, scampering toward us from under the lawn mower, were four big, juicy black bugs.

Of course, when they saw us they turned around and headed back under the mower. He pulled the mower out of the shed, and Poppy and Grace lined up to block the bugs from exiting. Since my instinct is to step on bugs, I stayed out of it.

There, way back in the corner near the rakes and brooms, were two huge crickets. We doused one with alcohol and captured it, and let the other one go. Out in the yard, we overturned stones and found villages of insects. Grace left that day with enough bugs to get at least a B-plus. I didn’t tell her that when I was her age, we thought it bad luck to kill a cricket. I’m not sure a cricket is even an insect anyway. I have the same doubts about the two spiders in her jar.

For me, the bug hunt was a lesson in organization and forethought. Since then, I’ve gone around to all the least likely places and collected the nail clippers and put them in the bathroom drawer where they belong.

But it leaves me with one lingering question. Why would anyone need nine pairs of nail clippers?

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.