Upon a time once not-so-long ago there was a chubby caterpillar who loved to loll in the sunshine, eating leaves. He didn't care what kind of leaves he ate -- big leaves, prickly leaves, red leaves, wilted leaves, speckled leaves, or even pieces of bark shaped like leaves. It was all deliciously the same to him. He munched on them from sun up to sun down, without a care in the world. He was well protected against predators, like most interim lepidoptera. His alternating black and green and blue bands told birds he tasted nasty. And the bristles on his rear formed an actual swastika, so parasitic wasps and bloodsucking squirrels were brought up short and scampered away, saying to themselves "Holy cow, that was a close call!"
As the easy summer days came to a close and the leaves dropped away while the sky became surly, all the other caterpillars spun themselves tightly into cocoons for the sullen winter months ahead - and then, when spring washed over the land, they would pop out as gorgeous butterflies, to the delight and applause of all. But our particular caterpillar, the one this story is about, did not choose to muck about with a cocoon. He just kept eating the last few remaining leaves, and didn't seem to care about the autumn rain that fell on him. He was so insulated with fat that the cold breezes of approaching winter didn't faze him one bit.
A leaf hopper, burrowing into a knothole on an oak tree, saw him marching happily along one blustery day and began scolding him.
"You need to spin your cocoon, youngster" it told him. "Mother Nature ain't gonna provide you with anything to eat over the winter, you can bet your bottom dollar on that!"
"Oh pooh" replied the caterpillar. "I can eat pine needles, when it comes to that, and I'm fat enough to stand the coldest blast of the North Wind. So a fig for your cocoon!"
The leaf hopper just shook its head and continued to wedge itself tighter and tighter into a crack in the knothole, until a chickadee swooped down and plucked it out with its bill.
A little boy, collecting fallen acorns to throw at his sister, saw our brightly colored caterpillar inching along high above, and asked his grandfather, who was watching cars go by in the street and wondering where everyone was rushing to, why the caterpillar was not dead yet.
"Oh, I reckon that old caterpillar is one of them caterpillars that don't cotton to turning into a butterfly" he told his little grandson. "So he's gonna spend the winter crawling around to visit the frost fairies and ice maidens."
The little boy looked up at his grandfather, and wondered what the old goon was talking about. Acorns made more sense, so he went back to collecting a formidable arsenal for when his sister came home from school.
But winter hesitated that year, and there came several weeks of warm sunshine that caused midges to swarm and house flies to seek out stale banana pudding. A snail, tucked away for the winter in an old bird's nest, put out its slimy neck one morning to gaze lethargically at our caterpillar friend munching on some lichen.
"Where's your cocoon?" it asked him dully.
"Don't have one; don't need one" the caterpillar replied.
"Gotta have a cocoon, dontcha?" asked the snail.
"Nope" said the caterpillar cheerfully. "A cocoon means painful change, the turmoil of mating, and a very limited lifespan, when you eventually come out of it. I intend to stay a caterpillar and avoid all that melodrama."
This was too much for the snail to take in, so he pulled his head back into his shell and fell into a happy thoughtless stupor. Snails like to while away the long winter hours dreaming they are Arnold Schwarzenegger beating up French people for eating escargot.
Strange to say, winter never really came that year. Instead, a withering simoom blew through the land, laying waste to the apple orchards and drying up every single cocoon -- so that when spring came dragging in with its muted charms there was not a single butterfly to come fluttering to life. There was just our friend, the stubborn, selfish, caterpillar -- who discovered that he was no longer a herbivore, but an omnivore. He grew so large he was even comfortable eating small dogs and kittens.
When it finally did snow, in July, our caterpillar friend decided he'd lived a full life and might as well spin his cocoon and turn into a butterfly -- he wondered grimly what people would say when they saw his tank-sized body flapping through the air. But it was impossible for him to find a branch strong enough to support him while he hung upside down to spin his cocoon.
So one night he broke into a tanning salon, crawled into a tanning bed, and somehow managed to turn it on. In the morning they found a muscular mothman lounging about. But no sign of a giant crispy caterpillar.
"Hello, ladies" he said in a low fuzzy voice. "Can I interest you in a pastille?"
"Look!" screamed one of the ladies. "He has a swastika on his butt!" They beat him senseless with rolled up People magazines and then the police escorted him to Warner Brothers Studio for the next Batman franchise movie.
And that's why you should always look both ways before you cross your eyes . . .
