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I killed two caterpillars on the front porch today.
These buck moth crawlers aren’t the cute friends you’d recognize from an Eric Carle book. They’re spiky little things, like pinky-sized porcupines, whose venom will leave you with a throbbing welt for 24 hours.
They show up during the nicest time of year in New Orleans, massing in the branches of our oaks.
Elsewhere, the azaleas, irises, and magnolias bloom. Music flows into the streets from festivals, weddings, and porch concerts. Crawfish are boiling, catfish are frying.
On gorgeous weekends like this one, we throw open the windows and let the cool air flow through the house.
Let’s get one thing straight: Life’s greatest pleasures come with a sting.
In my earliest memories, spring stands out because of one smell. One that I used to dread.
For years, I thought it was the scent of those buck moth caterpillars. A little sweet and faintly floral, it arrived around the time they started dropping from trees like malignant acorns.
On the playground, you’d hear a prolonged shriek when someone got hit. The nurse would hurry out, apply a strip of tape, and yank the caterpillars’ tines out of kindergartner flesh.
I wasn’t stung until adulthood. It hurts like hell.
But what stuck out to me was this scent. Its specter hung around the schoolyard like perfume, mingling in the air with the musk of freshly shredded mulch.
I learned in my twenties that this scent didn’t belong to caterpillars but to Confederate jasmine, an aggressive, if more beloved, fixture of the season whose vines billow from fences and telephone poles and sinkholes in great columns of green leaves and creamy white blooms. For two straight months in this city, you walk outside and be greeted by it.
The lovely, venomous harbinger of spring.
To me, nothing better represents the season. It’s a beautiful time, yes. A feast for the senses. It’s also fleeting. And when it’s over, the summer takes hold.
The days will get very long, and the cool air will escape our porous homes faster than the A/C can keep up. Our all-too-short spring is the last dance before the doldrums drive us inside—or worse, a hurricane blows in to finish this place off, once and for all.
It’s a heady cocktail, joy and doom, and this season of opposites can grab you in exhilarating ways.
A few years ago, my wife and I tried going to a show at Tipitina’s during Jazz Fest, usually the last good weekend of weather we get until fall. The show was sold out, so we were turned away and sent floating a few blocks down to Magazine Street. We stopped into Le Bon Temps Roule, the venerable dive where the Soul Rebels Brass Band holds court. Cover was an exorbitant $25, but it beat going home.
In the cramped back room where the band was blasting, the buoyant mood of brass and Miller High Life exploded when Jon Batiste emerged from the crowd and jumped up on stage, melodica in hand.
He sank into the band mid-song and egged the crowd into a frenzy with that persistent smile.
In the moment, this stroke of magic felt like it couldn’t happen any place else. But since then, I’ve come to appreciate the night on a more fundamental level. The way the energy, disappointment and surprise wove into a single evening. The elation wouldn’t have been possible without our planning blunder.
The band finished “Superstition” and Batiste settled into the number he came there to play, the old standard “St James Infirmary.” This is a song about a man imagining his own death when he sees his love’s dead body on a hospital slab.
The song started with its typical dirge-like drumbeat, but as he went, Jon livened it up. By the end, he'd turned this lament on inevitable doom into a rollicking dance party of horns and drums and voices.
For about six minutes, the entire room pulsed together. And then it was over. Batiste slipped out the back door, the band took a cigarette break, and we realized we were both huffing like we’d run a 10k.
Adrenaline is a drug, and the come-down hadn’t hit. When would we ever feel like this again?
We ducked out of the bar and walked home. The May heat was a week away. Soon, the caterpillars would go into their sacs until November, when they emerge to take over our back porch.
I drew a deep breath and caught the faintest hint of jasmine in the air. I was back on the playground at preschool, brimming with a child’s excitement.
If I’d been stung in the moment, I wouldn't have felt it until morning.