To A Flame

On a whim, I decided to dust off the top of my slant front desk, the one I use for doing my nails. I also use it for displaying some stuffed toys, since it's as good a place as any.

As I was ridding this surface of dust, I noticed something peculiar with one of the toys. The fur next to one of its ears seemed to be stuck together in a rather odd way, and I wondered if perhaps, at some point in the long distant past, a repair had been made there? Like some bit had been hot-glued together and over the past 30-odd years the glue had started to suffer some strange chemical changes.

Examining it a bit more closely, it looked almost as if a bit of spray-foam had gotten lodged in the fur. Given I was quite confident that I could certainly do a better repair now, assuming this was evidence a previous fix, I began picking the curious wad of... something, out from behind the ear.

After removal (pictured above), there appeared to be no damage to the bear at all. Whatever it was, it didn't appear to be the remnants of a past repair.

The object was somewhat crunchy, obviously hollow with a very thin shell, and rattled a little when shaken. I thought about just throwing it out and giving it no further thought, but then my curiosity got the best of me and I cut it in half with my scissors.

This turned out to be a slightly unfortunate decision, as what was revealed inside was in fact a caterpillar of some sort of silk moth.

Well, two halves of what up until then was a caterpillar of some sort of silk moth, and which was now leaking its half metamorphosized guts all over my kitchen counter. Oops. Also eww.

I didn't take a picture of the two caterpillar halves because I wanted to save you poor readers from the distress of looking at that mess, but I did take a few snaps of the cocoon.

I think this unfortunate fellow probably hitched a ride on my hoodie when I was doing a little yard work yesterday, then crawled from there over to the bear which, I guess, seemed like a cozy place to cocoon itself up. I can't imagine where else it could have come from, as the bear is pretty much smack dab in the middle of my house, so it's pretty unlikely that the caterpillar would have gone so far off course as to crawl over to my house, find a way inside, then crawl all the way to the middle of my house just to find this stuffed toy.

I'm certainly glad I found it when I did, though. I wouldn't really like to wake up one morning to find a giant silk moth fluttering around inside my house.

Also I'm happy to report that other than losing just the tiniest bit of fuzz, the bear is completely unharmed.