Dear friends, family, and driving adventurers. It is with a great sadness and a concerned curiosity I admit to you my windshield is a transparent killing field.
Driving a few giant loops around this country has led to both great adventures and an incredible amount of loss. I have been witness to death, friends. I have observed miniature catastrophes of tiny organic explosions, a biological fire works display when laminated safety glass forces antenna to accordion through the thorax and into the abdomen of nameless and countless insects.
These lost buzzing souls deserve a remembrance, an honoring.
My grandfather used to say, “They sing for some people” when a particularly loud pop was heard from the glass inches from his knuckles, white with grip upon the leather steering wheel. My siblings and I would chuckle in the back of his Buick LeSabre and Grandpa Chuck would hit the wipers, streaking iridescent innards across the windshield before the blades and blue fluid rubbed the scene clean.
Traveling in my car now, I have found myself presented with the same gruesome spectacle but laughter is lost on me. I am left in a morbid reflection, a wonderment of insect-ocide.
What was it that drew you in, dear bug? Did the sun bounce off my windshield and confuse you? Was it a reflection of the stretching road and blue skies that doomed you to this fatal collision? Did the fixed focus of your compound eyes do-you-in? Could you not detect the disastrous motion of my Subaru?
I think of the shocking realization you must have had milliseconds before your body was forced into itself. I question if you were a kamikaze bomber, flying with dark intention all along. Perhaps this lethal meeting of exoskeleton and automobile was the terrible result of a fight you thought you could win.
But there are no answers to these questions, no resolution to ponder, just confused silence. And in the end, after a percussive convergence, an aphid life is deleted with a crack and pop, scrubbed out of existence by a gas station squeegee.
But, dear friends, macabre meditation will lead us astray from recognizing a life well lived. Did not the itsy bitsy spider go up that spout again? Let us all get off of our tuffet, but not in fright as Miss Muffet did.
No, friends. Let us stand and rejoice in the buzzing orchestra of nature. Listen to the droning sound of their bumble and let it be echoed into the ages. And if you hear a pop on your windshield, let it not be the first note of Taps but serve as the resounding drumbeat of a march toward nirvana. We will miss you, tiny insect. You were a bug but not a bother. Buzz on, little friend, buzz on.
