Remember When?..

Growing up I remember spending much of my summers outside, exploring the backyard with my sister. Playing in our playground, riding our bikes and scooters, along with looking for insects peeking out from under the rocks and stepping stones. We usually made up extravagant plans to catch various insects, like pill bugs (rolly pollies), crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies, and whatever else we could find.
One of our most successful plans was catching a butterfly in a bucket. Now that I say it, it doesn’t sound like much of a plan. It was really just Karissa and I waiting patiently with a bucket, and threw it over the butterfly. But when you’re five years old, a simple bucket and a lot of patience seems like the scheme of the century.
Anyways, we caught the butterfly in the bucket, and felt like we had just won the lottery. We have a butterfly now, wasn’t that so cool? It was indeed not cool. It wasn’t until after we hopped around and celebrated like kindergarteners do, that we realized we couldn’t see our butterfly. We failed to consider the fact that our bucket was made of thick orange plastic. We looked down at the bucket, I remember feeling sad. I had just imprisoned an innocent little butterfly in my plastic bucket. It wasn’t even worth it since we couldn’t see it, so we caused it trouble for nothing. It reminded me of that scene in Tinkerbell, where she’s trapped in a little house by the British girl, only this time it was stuck in my dad’s old Home Depot bucket. We let it go, and it flew away as if it hadn’t just been encaptured by a dumb pair of twins. We still somehow felt accomplished for being able to catch a butterfly. It’s a pretty hard task, I bet you’ve never caught a butterfly with your twin sister. But we weren’t done.
We looked around for another victim. Walking in between our rose bushes, and woodchips, we crouched down and lifted rocks and stones to find rolly pollies who scrambled around, frantically trying to find a place where our sticky child hands couldn’t find them. We would pick them up and I remember Karissa always complaining. “It peed on meeee” and she would throw up her hand and FLING THE POOR THING ACROSS OUR YARD, probably into our dog’s pile of poop.
Feeling unfulfilled, I kept looking for something cool to find. Rolly pollies were regulars, always around to be found in the damp soil. They’re more of a last resort exploration, since they’re so common and easy to catch. But then we saw something. A cricket. Hopping about, unknowing of what was to come. Crickets are a bit harder to catch, so we ACTUALLY planned this one out. We somehow caught it in, you guessed it, a bucket. A much smaller, metal bucket. BUT, we learned from the butterfly incident and wanted to keep it in something clear. So we brought out a sandwich bag, and without crushing the cricket, caught it with the very edge of the bucket. Being very careful as to not crush the poor creature, I tried to not press too hard. So, with my shoe placed gently atop the bucket, pinning the cricket between the bucket and the woodchips, Karissa knelt down, sandwich bag in hand, and surrounded it. I lifted off my foot and the bucket and the cricket jumped in. It probably thought it was escaping, but it was in fact trapping itself. Now that was a real accomplishment.
We sealed the bag, and took our cricket slave around our backyard, investigating its features. It twitched and tried to move in the creepy way an insect does. So neither of us really wanted to hold it. After tossing it around to each other, I decided to put it away until later needed. It sat on the table in his plastic bag like a fish.
When our mom got home, and we showed her our amazing catch of the day, she pointed out to us that the bag didn’t have any air holes.
This was a pretty nice memory that my sister and I always cherish. We will randomly bring it up whenever butterflies, buckets, or crickets are mentioned. But I sadly can’t say the same for those poor insects.