Meming the neighbors

Our new neighborhood has a micro-kinder-culture that celebrates decorative crocs, hoverboards, and worms. Small posses of children migrate from house to house, rolling as if weightless on their electric craft, stomping across lawns in their spangled rubber shoes, overturning every brick and paving stone in their neighbors’ backyards, yelling “Jackpot!” when they find a particularly long and/or swollen earthworm, then triumphantly absconding with the squirming creatures in their soiled hands.

Where do the children go when they leave us? I couldn’t say. I have not been to their homes. I have not stolen worms from their yards. It’s just not a thing where I’m from. As a progressive woman of middle age, I try to tolerate the foreign neighborhood kinder-culture, but I also find myself feeling threatened in the midst of this constant earthworm transport. Especially because we are still fighting a pandemic that was probably started at a wet market. I don’t know what these kids are doing with these live worms, if they’re selling them to restaurants or what, but I feel that it’s only a matter of time before a disease jumps from worm to kid, or god forbid from kid to worm. Then what?

That is a rhetorical question. We all know what will happen. Little worm hospitals. Tanks of oxygen the length of their slimy, unfurled bodies.

By the way, my mom told me recently that when she was little she ate a roly-poly on a dare and she is like a different person to me now.

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