Lesson learned

 When I was a boy, my grandfather found a wasp’s gall. He cut it off with his pocketknife and put it in his shirt pocket, next to the Prince Albert tin.

He had intended to sit in his easy chair and, with the 8-year-old version of me as an audience, dissect the gall with a spey blade, showing the wasps within.

But he forgot. Grandmother found the gall while sorting the laundry.

In some families, certain offenses require all the women in the family to weigh in. Grandfather had two daughters, one of which was my mother, and I think at least one great-aunt was visiting. Grandfather was thoroughly blessed out. The lesson I learned had nothing to do with the biology of wasps but with the social order within human families.

I thought of that lesson when I was clearing the blackberry vines off the path to the woodlot and came across a gall. It was made by a blackberry knot gall wasp, Diastrophus nebulosus.

The gall was big enough to have several chambers, and I thought that a dissection might reveal at least six little wasps.

But I learned my lesson. The gall is still on the vine, the one still standing by the path.