the mothman

i just came in from the back yard, wielding a pair of - you guessed it - regular adult scissors, and an heb bag. while i'd love to pretend that i'm a crack gardener who spends hours outside with her gloves, kneeling pad, and handy bag of special gardening tools, the truth is i have about 15 minutes during nap time and a grocery bag.
the victim of my exotic kitchen shears?
a beautiful, lush, native vine that (for the second year in a row) has climbed over into our yard from our neighbor-in-back. who, by the way, IS a crack gardener - with a beautifully landscaped and maintained yard, complete with carefully selected and pruned native plants and flowers.
go figure.
anyway, this beautiful vine happens to be night-blooming, with large (at least 3-inch in diameter) luminous night flowers.
last summer, i thought: how beautiful!
but guess what large, white, night-blooming flowers attract?
really, really large moths.
REALLY large moths, with wing spans up to maybe 5 or 6 inches - they look like small birds.
and they SOUND like small birds, too, when the cats bring them into your house through the cat door at night and then LET THEM GO to play chase with them all around the kitchen and - AND - your bedroom.
so that at 2 in the morning when you wake to hear fluttering, whirring, and the skittering of small claws across the wood floor, you know there is a very very large flying insect batting its blind way around your bed.

this is very awful.

(have you gathered, by the amount of superlatives and adverbs i'm using, that this bothers me? a little?)

especially when you have to wash your sheets in the morning because there is brown MOTH DUST on them from where one of the cats pinned the mothman to your pillow while you were shrieking in the bathroom.

so today i went out and hacked that vine to tiny, tiny bits and threw it away.

i can deal with two toddlers with fevers and strep.

i can deal with 14 three-year-olds alone in a classroom for four hours.

i CANNOT deal with very large flying insects in my room in the middle of the night.

(sorry, jon. ;)