The Inchworm Knows What Time of Year It Is

My five year old son came running up to me today, his face grubby with dirt and shining with wonder.”Look, Mommy, Look! Look what I found crawling on me.”

In his carefully cupped hands he held an emerald green inchworm.

I nodded and told him, as hundreds of generations of mothers have before me, “It means you will be getting new clothes. That’s an inchworm and she is measuring you for a new set of clothes.”

He didn’t much care. All he cared about was that he had a cool, bright green caterpillar that crawled around in a funky way.

The funny thing is that the little inchworm was right. My son is getting a new set of clothes this week (a few actually). He starts kindergarten in just a few weeks. *sigh* Mothers are so glad and so sad to see these events come.

I didn’t know too much about our little harbinger of scholastic days to come so I thought I would look it up. Our little inchworm is actually a “Geometer Moth” caterpillar. I couldn’t pin down the exact species though. There are a million sites with pictures of the moths and precious few that have correctly identified pictures of the caterpillars. As frustrating as this is for me, it is not surprising. The Geometridae family of moths contains over 26,000 species. No butterfly collector could know them all.

But I shot a little bit of the measuring action of our little seamstress and put it up on YouTube (the video above) so you could see how they move and how they came to be called inchworms.

It’s not fair. Little caterpillars from my garden are not suppose to come and remind me of life. Life does that very well on its own, thank you very much.