The Amusing Dung Beetle

I think of my older sister now living in a nursing home in a tiny southwestern Kansas town and her heroic efforts to fake her way through her short-term memory loss. She was always the Big Girl and I was the pesky tag-along little sister. When I call her on the phone, I try to think of things we used to do together long ago because her long-term memory remains good. Today I thought of dung beetles.

We were farm girls on a farm smack in the middle of the Oklahoma panhandle and the Dust Bowl. Isolated, with nothing much more than our imaginations to play with. When we were quite young, one of our chores was to walk out into the pasture every evening and herd the milk cows into the barn so Daddy could do the milking. One day we discovered dung beetles rolling balls of cow dung over the dirt--for what reason we never knew. We called them shit bugs; we didn't know they had a polite name. We might have treated them with more respect if we had known. Watching them roll dung, faithfully tending to their lives' destinies, was mildly amusing; but the real fun was touching their pointy butts with our toes and watching them stick those butts high into the air, pointing skyward like tiny cannons. We squealed with laughter. They never disappointed us. Farm kids take their fun wherever they can find it.

Now it's time to call my sister. I can't help hoping that she remembers even more of this story than I do.