maylands - cape lilac tree
at the back of sherwood was a big cape lilac tree that spawned beautiful purple flowers. it also spawned thousands of fuzzy brown caterpillars in the summer, and the creatures would take shelter in my cool dark basement bedroom, turning the stone floor into a throbbing brown carpet.
i always had the mobility and grace to step around the things but my drunkard housemate malcom would always trudge in and leave an abject trail of blood and guts.
i lost sympathy for the bugs when i realised they werent gonna turn into beautiful butterflies but pathetic moths - those tiny brown ones that are always trying to kill themselves by smashing their heads against your light fixtures or drown themselves in your coffee. i bought a can of mortein.
but trying to murder ten thousand of bugs just made the situation more distressing. i was learning nothing from history. so i tried more preventative measures like blocking up the door cracks or covering the floor in salt (which for bugs is like walking on broken glass, but still, the masochists kept infiltrating my basement. eventually i called my botanist ex girlfriend for advice and she told me about a chemical called dipel which was made just for cape lilac trees, harming its spawn but nothing else. with my spraybottle i walked down to the tree and noticed that the branches were writhing. the thick brown ropes of caterpillars copulating among the half hatched eggs looked like something from a HR giger painting. i sprayed the tree from top to toe and within a few days the caterpillars were gone. fuck em!
when we moved out shortly after (the ordeal of the cape lilac was too much) i left the dipel on the counter with a note for the next tenants. the real estate agency must have thrown it away, because the next home owner cut the tree straight down. ah well. fuck it!