Jiggery Iddle

There lived a ladybug named Iddle. Upon this time he lived under a crunchy brown leaf beneath the tallest tree on the High Blue Hill. His first name, for those of you who are nosy, was Jiggery. Iddle was a very serious beetle--seriouser, even, than the great Thertoe himself. And Thertoe was so serious he ran off to the Big City to live deliberately in the highest corner of the tallest skyscraper the giants had managed to invent.

Not so, Iddle. Iddle composed himself under his crunchy leaf to ponder the passing of time by the shifting flecks of light that pierced his frail dwelling. When his friend ant stopped by to visit, Iddle stared him solemnly out of countenance. When grasshopper popped in to fiddle a bit, Iddle danced such an awful, serious jig that grasshopper stumbled away with his head full of spinning second hands. The grasshopper flung himself into the sky to try to recapture his merry way, but he felt so like the coo-coo in its clock that he gave up the effort and sat morosely chewing tobacco until he forgot to remember. Finally the spittle bug skittered across Jiggery Iddle's somber stoop. (If you are wondering why so many folk stopped by such fellow's place, then you need only think of staring contests. Or smiling contests. And how everyone who loses tries to make the others crack up.) Anyhow, the spittle bug blew a great mound of bubbles around his delicate green self and stared at Jiggery through them. "You are all over rainbows," said the spittle bug, in a delicate green voice. "Have the goodness," said Jiggery, "to remove your trite reflections from my flecks of sunlight. I am thinking." The spittle bug, being a sensitive creature, blubbered a bit on his way out.

And so, for a while, Iddle enjoyed the little dimness and little sun flecks under his low, wrinkled ceiling. And then the wind blew. It billowed down from the tree tops and slurped through dusty old roots and tangled brambles. It sucked up Jiggery Iddle and his leaf and flung them upwards--and as the air shivered over his bright shell, Jiggery announced, "This is exactly what I have been expecting all along." Only nobody was around to hear him. The leaf did many amazing gymnastics in the air, which I do not think Jiggery could have entirely expected, and finally ended up, somehow, in the very top of the tree. Jiggery clawed himself out, toe by toe, from his crinkled leaf, and announced again, "Just what I thought." Only it wasn't. It was big and blue and went on and on, up and up--and beneath it was green after green, down to the bare brown earth--and beyond it kept going far, far out, the blue and the green and the invisible wind. And the beetle began to think--slowly, in his little brain beneath his hard shell--that perhaps crunchy leaves and sun specks and even the passing of time were not the most serious things, after all.

If you ask me, I cannot tell you for sure where Iddle is now--perhaps trying to see through the spittle bug's bubbles, or encouraging grasshopper to make a wind song, or cheering on ant in his hurry work. Or maybe (but I hope not)crawling up my wall to find his own corner.