Stewarding Luck

Praying mantises appear five months after landscapers lay sod for the backyard. It’s late fall in 2020 and a fertile future slowly erases the dirt plot of my before. Grass has already begun to grow out of the mesh binding it together. Yet the raised planters hold loose, sterile soil—a consequence of hiring a cheap, off-the-books landscaping company. Despite constant arduous care and several pleas to the sun to lessen its brutality, there’s only a rainbow chard I salvaged from a nearby elementary school and a cherry tomato plant refusing to ripen.

I see the first praying mantis while I’m washing dishes. The window above the kitchen sink provides a perfect square of lush green for me to escape into while I do chores. The mantis clings to the top of the window screen. I quiet the clanking and banging of dishes as if the noise will chase away this new friend. When we first moved into our house, I was apprehensive about scorpions and venomous spiders we might encounter. Now I love to watch for creatures visiting the garden. A dragonfly visited two months back, flitting around the tomato plant’s flowered promises of fruiting bodies. I stilled my movements then too as I followed it before it darted off. I wished it had stayed longer. Dragonflies are considered symbols of luck, so are praying mantises. I debate getting closer to the mantis to truly imbibe whatever good fortune it brings me before it flees too.

Standing in front of the window outside, I fight intrusive thoughts whispering that the mantis will jump on my face, into my open mouth (which is closed), or that I’ll smash it. The praying mantis cocks its head and I imagine it sees me, really sees me. It knows I’m not going to harm it. I leave it alone and return to the sink, keeping an eye on its abdomen as it inches out of sight.

Three weeks later, as winter creeps toward us, my oldest daughter lays her coat on our patio couch and when she picks it up, another praying mantis crawls out of it. Maybe it’s the one from the window. It’s the same size and color but with more red streaks on its body and forelegs. I summon the belief that as the backyard becomes a verdant haven for me in quarantine, it’s also transforming into a reservoir for luck we can draw on for protection while a pandemic rages around us.

2021’s summer begins with a wave of fresh luck spilling below the kitchen windowsill. Baby praying mantises, each about the length of a small paper clip and cream-colored, blend in with the stucco as they skitter around the wall’s cracks and uneven hills. They vanish from sight as my eyes fail to focus on their bodies. There are too many to count.

The emergence of the praying mantises evokes hope in me. Most of my gardening techniques are based on intuiting what the land (and I) needs. I don’t have the patience to read through gardening books or abide by instructions on seed packets. I want to work it out through trial and error. This new batch of praying mantises convinces me I’m on the right, albeit bumpy, path. Despite slow growth the previous year, luck has shifted my way.

I see the mantises again weeks later. They’ve molted into lean, green predators that dine on white flies plaguing the sunflowers. The American Giants and Mammoth Russians can hardly bear the weight of their frilly heads because white flies have weakened them. So, I trim the brittle, sun-fried leaves and thin the sunflower patch. Some sunflowers shoot up another foot in height, and the praying mantises grow larger as the white flies dissipate. Pride washes over me.

The world is in turmoil outside of the backyard. COVID-19 variants and mass shootings have increased in frequency since the global community shed its quarantine skin. It often feels like I’m playing probabilities when I leave the house and return unscathed. It’s a constant game of chance I attribute to everything to make sense of my placement in the world right now. And every time I return home unmarred, I believe the greater the chances are that I won’t the next time I venture out. I wrestle with myself to keep from becoming a recluse and increasing my odds of survival. But in the backyard, there are few life-threatening variables that endanger the thriving ecosystem I have nurtured.

When temperatures soar, another batch of baby praying mantises explores the wall around the kitchen window. My luck multiplies. I don’t know why mantises favor this particular spot. I search the cracked stucco for the mother’s ootheca, the egg sac, so I can divine from it like a soothsayer. I don’t find it. Instead, I silently plead for the mantises to keep coming back. It’s safe here.

Death stalks the garden a year later. All of my spring planting is for naught. A portulaca I planted last year to attract pollinators dies. The butterhead and romaine lettuce bolt prematurely, then the Japanese lettuce too. Sunchokes, in a cruel twist of their name, strangle under the sun’s cruel grasp, and soon I pull their withered bodies from the earth. The yerba mansa and lemongrass follow suit.

The mass death confuses me at first. Every year brings a new change to the seasons. I’m dependent on my skill as a gardener as much as I am on the climate’s whims. There’s a great beauty to what we produce when the environment and I operate in sync. And gardening is therapy for my soul. As I stare at empty planters day after day, I realize I’ve become negligent in my duties as weariness eats me alive. I’ve been living through the Russian-Ukraine war, the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas; a decline in civil rights, a violent threat against the summer camp my oldest daughter was attending, and my compounding grief. The soil holds it all and suffers under my absence.

The sunflowers are steadfast and I, still negligent, watch them thrive from a distance. As soon as I think I can count on their survival, my luck sours. Maggots infest their yellowed heads. Petals riddled with holes litter the ground around them. Thin white strands hang around their stems like nooses. I watch all of this in disgust until I realize that even as I rely on the garden to do its part for me to properly tend it, I have to make my own luck. Success is about what I do just as much as it’s about what I don’t do. I shake myself from my funk as cutworms attack the amaranth next. In a haste to protect a neighboring watermelon patch from infestation, I sever vines growing two small melons.

Guilt eats me up and the excruciating heat does the rest. An heirloom tomato plant is all that remains. I drown it with water and sorrow. Staring at silt swirling in the pot, I notice  frenzied movement rippling the water. Praying mantises surface and scurry up the tomato plant’s thick stem. They seem too small for this time of year. I scoop up one and move it higher up the plant. In the coming days, I keep watch over the mantises but even under my caretaker’s gaze, I find fewer of them until I see none at all.

I’m near to embracing failure—so close, I almost collapse into its arms—when I spot the biggest praying mantis I’ve ever seen. Her wide body clings to the patio couch’s synthetic cover as she secretes a white foamy substance from her backend. This familiar act is ingrained in my own body. She’s in labor.

I run inside to retrieve my two young daughters. We quietly watch bubbles ooze out of the mother mantis. I tell them what’s happening then caution them to leave her alone. Hours later, the mantis is gone and her ootheca, now light brown and hardened, sticks to the couch cover. I usher my daughters outside again and tell them never to bother the egg sac as I conscript them into watching over it.

“There are babies inside,” I whisper. They understand this means the egg sac needs to be protected.

“We won’t bother them, mama,” they say. “We promise.”

This act of eco-motherhood positively feeds my compulsive nature. I check on the egg sac throughout winter. Feral cats roam through our backyard at night. They hide underneath the couch covering and I gently shake the cover in order to ward them off. I worry one will brush against the sac and dislodge it. During afternoons, I monitor the sprinklers to ensure they don’t spray water on the ootheca.

Every spare moment, I worry I’m not doing enough for the baby mantises growing inside the sac. Survival of the fittest seems to be the social rule of law now. Social media documents people handing out malice in spades. There’s a particular brusqueness in my interactions with others in public. I try not to bring these sentiments with me when I return home from running errands. It seems particularly cruel not to care for the egg sac when honeybee and other insect populations are declining, global temperatures are rising, and seasons arrive with a peculiar tilt. Vulnerability thrums loudly through the world’s bone marrow. We must become better stewards of an environment that exists on a precarious edge.

Heat bursts through the front end of 2023’s spring. It’s been six months since the mother mantis first laid the ootheca, and nothing has happened. Praying mantis eggs usually hatch in the summer, around June or July, but heat blossoms when it chooses to in the desert—we’re never ready for it. Plus, it’s possible the egg sac has gone bad. The winter was harsh. Periodic storms battered our house and patio with torrential rain, wind, and trash. Even though my faith in the egg sac’s viability is brittle, I know I have to carve out the blessing I hope to receive. I offer up a bit of my own luck to the mantises; I cross my fingers and pray.

Collective anguish gathers beyond the garden. Wars escalate, politicians scheme, and debt increases. I know only so much of what’s happening is within my control, so I do what I can then turn to the garden where I can force luck’s hand in my favor more often. I occupy early mornings and late afternoons with watering Chinese trumpet vines and amending soil. The garden planters house newly sprouting desert sunflowers, a transplanted prickly pear, and sipper plants. Soon, low buzzing weaves through the planters on stained-glass wings of flies and bumblebees.

As a child, I wandered the gardens surrounding my grandparents’ property in my maternal grandfather’s footsteps. He took immaculate care of the vegetables and flowers he grew. He fed stray cats and exterminated snakes only as necessary. He sang hymns and hummed as he watered. My grandfather was the truest example of stewardship. I hope we never have snakes and I won’t be feeding the feral cats that use the backyard as a litter box, but whatever shade I have is theirs. Watching my grandfather seeded my own stewardship, an everlasting gift I hope to nurture each time I open the sliding glass door and enter the yard.

One day I walk outside for no other reason than to stand in the warmth of the sun. When my skin burns, I turn to go inside but pause at the sight of the egg sac. It’s split open. The babies, fingernail sized slices of cream, are almost camouflaged against the couch cover. They bob and sway on the synthetic cloth then pause before they scatter in all directions, hop onto the ground, and escape into a field of green.

DW McKinney is a writer and editor based in Nevada. A 2024 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, The Normal School, and TriQuarterly. She is also a nonfiction editor for Shenandoah. Say hello at dwmckinney.com.

Published April 15 2024