Worm graveyard: death by carpet
They creep in through a gap in the doorframe. They swiftly inch their way across the carpet, picking up whatever small bits of dust and dirt they might encounter. Some have been known to make it all the way across the room, only to perish; others make it only part of the way. The morning after a heavy rainshower, there may be five or six scattered around the room. If they’re lucky, one or two may survive the night.
When I was a child walking home from school one day, I sang to myself, “Don’t step on the wormiiiees…” la dee da. I recalled it again walking home one recent evening when I could barely tell the difference between worms and bits of sticks on the black asphalt, surrounded by grass on either side, its wet surface gleaming occasionally under the white soccer field lights nearby. “Don’t step on the wormies.” I tried my best not to while I wondered whether the person a distance ahead of me was thinking the same thing.
For two days, it poured as it often does in Vancouver. Last night we had to rescue two worms from the fuzzy desert, and upon opening the door to toss them back to the grass, we were shocked to see several dozen worms (“thousands,” he said) crawling down the cement wall and across the cement “floor” that divides our basement, like many others, from the lawn. I didn’t even know they could scale a wall. The must be drowning in the grass—with land this flat, there’s no runoff to drain the yard—and their quickest way out is, unfortunately, death by carpet. The ones that don’t make it to the house either congregate in the wettest spot, say, under an empty flower pot, or wither away on the concrete. It’s impossible to clean up, but that’s not the point. This design: flat lawn, saturated with water; a concrete wall and a concrete floor; a gap in the door. It leads to a futile escape. Our solution? Not cheap, but for the sake of the worms and the soil they replenish, and for the beautification of the spot now that cedar shrubs minimize the grass clippings that sprinkle our entryway, the thought is to install a wooden planter or two with some nice plants. Ideally, when they crawl down the wall, they’ll find their way into it. Is it worth the cost?
