The winter wind battered the house last night, howling down the chimney like a wild thing wanting in. All night I cheered it on, remembering the worms.
One of the nicest aspects of winter in the prairies is that, unlike our warmer seasons, it’s insect-free. Saskatchewan readers will remember last year’s infestation of worms – forest tent caterpillars, more correctly. They invaded in the spring, a creeping, dangling, squirming, munching force that drove some of us mad. We spent entire weekends shovelling them off our decks, cutting them out of our trees and blasting them off walls, sidewalks and streets with power hoses.
In many areas, the chewing army stripped entire regions of the lovely deciduous foliage, leaving only bare trees. The trees do leaf out again, but the process robs them of needed energy to fight other parasites, disease and decay.
After the tent caterpillars finish their season of gorging, each one becomes an extremely short-lived, unremarkable-looking brown moth. But before it dies, the female moth lays hundreds of eggs in narrow bands around thin twigs, cables and even clotheslines. It then coats them with the equivalent of black tar, which hardens like concrete.
The finished casing passes at first glance as a barely noticeable, tightly wrapped black twist tie encircling the twig or cable. Almost indestructible, so hard it can barely be chipped off with a knife, the black coating insulates and protects the eggs from rain, wind, frost and weeks of frigid prairie winter.
After our windy night, the sun shone brightly, but the needle on the thermometer near the garden door pointed straight west. Thirty degrees below Celsius. Combined with the windchill, that makes our prairie air a keen more-than-forty below zero. When I stepped outside to re-fill the birdfeeders on both decks, it took only thirty-three seconds before my bare hands refused to obey my brain.
Nevertheless, bring it on, I say. In fact, I embrace cold this year. According to my basic research, it takes below average temperatures of minus forty or colder for about a week to kill off many of those eggs, leaving fewer to hatch and bug us this spring.
It’s only January. Plenty of time for what remains of our prairie winter to display the bottom-side of our thermometers and make a decent dent in next year’s caterpillar populations. That hope makes the harshness of winter easier to bear. Because with the plunging mercury comes the reminder that not only will spring come as it always does in God’s pattern for nature, but that with every descending degree, every howling cold night, every frozen toe and finger, some simultaneous good is in process. Something that would be impossible without the temperatures we love to complain about.
The worms and the weather demonstrate a parallel spiritual principle, one both emphasized throughout the Bible and proven in history: God often allows what he hates in order to bring about that which he loves. Our part is not to complain, but trust.
