The Mind Makes Mysterious Connections

So there we were last night, in the dark basement, me out of my lair and laid back in the recliner, The Pony on his cheap couch gaming on his laptop, both of us watching a DVR of Cutthroat Kitchen, the one where the sabotage was to get makings for a deli sandwich out of a vending machine. The time was 8:35, when The Pony usually trots upstairs for his hour shower and then bedtime.

"HEY! I just got a reminder of Grandma!"

I looked over to see what had roused him from his gaming stupor. He was beaming, and pointing to the screen of his laptop. I wondered if maybe a long-lost email had popped up. Mom was not one for emailing The Pony, though. She kept that up with a few of her long-distance friends, but not us relatives.

"Look. It's a ladybug. Just like Grandma had in her house."

Indeed. She had a drop-ceiling full of them. I asked her if she was going to get an exterminator, and she said no, that she sometimes sucked them off the walls and carpet with her vacuum and dumped them outside, but mostly they just went back up in the ceiling at night and she forgot about them. Which made me think of that drop ceiling in her family room collapsing one day with the weight of tons of ladybugs.

The Pony grabbed a Puffs With Lotion and scooted it along his laptop screen, trying to capture the ladybug. "At first I thought it was actually clicking on things. A part of my screen highlighted when I first saw it, but I think that's because I accidentally hit my mouse."

He put the tissue in front of the ladybug, and it crawled on. "I THINK it's a ladybug. Maybe it's just a beetle. Look. It has spots. But it's not bright red. More orange."

"That's a ladybug. Now what are you going to do with it?"

The Pony looked perplexed. "I don't know. What SHOULD I do with it?"

"Well, you can let it go somewhere away from me, or you can put it outside, or you can flush it."

"I'm taking it outside." He carried it gingerly on the tissue like a young ring-bearer bearing a ring at a wedding. Out of the TV area, past the pool table, through the workshop, and to the basement door out to the pool. "There. I let it go. That was weird."

I know I saw a ladybug upstairs in the master bathroom a few months ago. I lost track of it. Haven't seen one all this time. We don't usually have an infestation. More millipedes and field mice have gained entrance than ladybugs.

Funny how things get your attention.