I arrived at the physical therapist with five caterpillars in my hair. When I stood in front of the mirror I saw them crawling, Medusa was not there. “Can happen,” said the practitioner diplomatically, as if he had experienced it before. In the morning, on a walk through the woods, I had become entangled in gossamer threads that hovered above the path. From each thread hung caterpillars of the cardinal’s hat-spot moth, pale yellow with black spots. At first they had gorged themselves on the green leaves of the cardinal’s hat and wrapped the bush in white silk for cocooning. The most adventurous individuals now abseil elsewhere to pupate. Distracted by a mysterious text message from my father – “Can you bring a broken pantyhose?” – I had not seen their threads hanging and I would have walked full into the caterpillar curtain.
The physical therapist gave me a two-pound weight with which I had to lift 15 times with the right, but halfway through I lost count. “Can happen,” he said again. And a moment later, when I almost dropped the weight on his toes: “Never mind.” I asked him if it was difficult to always be friendly. He smiled. “No, I’m here to help people.”
I felt an unreasonable irritation, as I often feel with people who are nicer than me. It is precisely because of the equanimity of the other that I am confronted with my own capriciousness. I thought of the Swedish friend from whom I once learned the word ‘lagom’. A word that means something like ‘just right’, or ‘just as it should be’. The green beans I made for him were lagom, the bed he slept in was lagom, my house was lagom, I was lagom. After a few days it came out of my throat. “Can you please stop responding so evenly?” I snapped. “You are as neutral as your country.” Afterwards I apologized. The friend could laugh about it in all his mildness. This week he emailed me in response to the NATO news: “Not so neutral anymore…”
I left the caterpillars in the privet hedge next to the physiotherapy practice; I hoped that for want of cardinal hats they would be content with privet leaves. At home, I grabbed a pair of tattered tights from a drawer full of ladder-rich ones—for years I’ve had the expectation that they will one day become fashionable, following the ripped-knee jeans—and left for my parents.
Immediately after the endive stew, my father showed me his invention: a bamboo stick with a bent iron wire on top. “A landing net,” he proclaimed proudly. “This way we will soon be able to catch water fleas in the ditch to feed the goldfish.” He cut one of the stocking feet off my tights and attached it to the ring.
Lagom, we concluded with satisfaction.
Gemma Venhuizen is a biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 18, 2022