Beetles

For some reason I am thinking back to when we drove home at Christmas to my Aged Mother's house. It was quite rainy so we were driving slowly. We were also exhausted because we'd just flown in that morning from Vietnam on an overnight flight. To make matters worse we were driving a old car belonging to the mother of a friend of ours and we were slightly paranoid about it packing up on us in the middle of nowhere. We were about 150 km from home.

I could smell, coming into the car from the outside air, a sharp green acid smell. It was the smell of christmas beetles. (I hope you know what a christmas beetle is. It's a dark brown beetle, about the size of the end of your thumb. I don't know if their proper name is christmas beetle or if it's just a made up name that my family used, like the name "walking peanut" which is what we called one of the common sorts of small brown beetle that used to get caught in the flyscreens all the time.)

It transported me back to when I was young and we would go to the university or to my father's work and play tennis under the lights in summer. The bright lights would attract thousands of christmas beetles that would swarm around, buzzing and swaying clumsily through the air and crashing even more clumsily to the ground to lie on their backs and wave their legs feebly in the air on the concrete courts. The air was filled with the smell of them.

It was usually cool at night even though it was summer, though the courts would still be warm. I would flick the beetles off the court with my racket because I felt sorry for them for being so hopelessly inadequate at the task of righting themselves. The tennis balls almost glowed yellow. They always seemed new, probably because we didn't play very often. There were dense rows of pines adjacent to the courts and when it was my turn to sit out for a while I would creep under the trees and get their sticky sap on my hands from pulling the young pine cones off the branches.

I have no idea why the smell of the beetles was so strong right there at that point on the road on Christmas eve, nor why I had not noticed or thought about the smell since I was much younger. Perhaps it was the exhaustion and stress that planed away our everyday worries and allowed me to notice it. But it brought back a lot of happy memories, so I was glad for it.