Entomological Mystery

 

      When these minute black specks started showing up on the rim of my bathtub, I figured something was slowly disintegrating up on the ceiling and dropping dust.  If I Kleenex-ed it away, it reappeared the very next day. I didn’t make the connection with insect life until one day as I was reading the morning paper, and a minute bit of print started scurrying across the page.  I automatically squashed it with a finger, and so the day started with a death.  A very small death.

     I can’t find the right words to tell you how tiny these things are, whatever they are.  For their size – for their non-size – they cover ground remarkably fast.  One just hurried across the screen as I’m writing to you.  They don't jump at all, just walk or run.  The house seems full of them.  Those moribund bathtub ones must have drowned in the moisture.  And I am sure that in 87 years I’ve never seen them before.

     I post this in hopes that someone out there has some information.  I can’t even Google these bits of creatures – can’t find the right search words.

     But at any rate,  I didn’t have to go to the trouble of looking up the word entomology – it seems it’s perfectly proper to say insectology.