Hope Ryden

“Come on in,” she said. “I’m grounded.”
“You can’t come out?” I asked in amazement. This had never happened to me. “What did you do?”
“It was the caterpillars,” she said. “Come, let me show you.”
She led me to the dining room window, which looked out on what had once been a vegetable garden.
“They dee-stroyed it.” She made a dramatic sweeping motion with her arm to emphasize the extent of the damage.
“Your grandmother’s garden is gone?”
“Totaled,” she said with a hint of satisfaction.
That it was. I stared at the devastation. Every leaf had either been entirely eaten or was hanging lacy and dead on brown stalks. What a scene there must have been at Greta’s house. I felt my face burning with shame and fear over what we had done.
“You could hear them crunching, there were so many of them,” Greta went on. She seemed to relish telling the details. “And you should have seen my grandmother. She was out there swinging her cane around.”
Suddenly, I had a terrible feeling that I was going to laugh. The more I tried not to, the more I felt I would. I tried to control myself by saying something that turned out to be pretty lame.
“Were any of the caterpillars saved?”
I could hardly get the last word out before I was in convulsions on the floor. This set off Greta, and her laughs came in long shrieks. The two of us laughed so hard we hurt. We laughed so long we almost wet our pants. Our gasps and snorts brought her grandmother downstairs to ask what was the matter with us. This just set us off again. I thought we would never stop; I thought we would die laughing.
That was the beginning of a great friendship.”
― Hope Ryden, Backyard Rescue