The Hammocks at Southport · August 2026
I want to tell you about the week I became a moth expert. I did not plan on this. I am 64 years old, and I thought by now I had a pretty reasonable handle on the world. Then the moths showed up.
It started simply enough. I walked into my garage one morning and noticed something moving. A few small moths — ten, maybe twelve — fluttering around near the shelves. I figured they had wandered in through the door. No big deal. I went about my day.
The next morning: twenty-five of them. Maybe more.
By the third day, I stepped into the garage and there were forty or fifty moths in the air. The garage was alive with them. I am not a spring chicken, as my mother used to say, but I had never seen anything quite like this in my life. Something was clearly going on, and I had no idea what it was.
I grabbed my box of bird seed — I keep a feeder out back, and I top it off every morning, which is one of my favorite ten minutes of the day — and I carried it outside toward the yard. When I opened the lid, moths exploded out of that box like I had shaken a snow globe.
And then I understood. The moths were coming from the bird seed. Somehow, my garage had turned into a moth nursery, and the bird seed was ground zero.
The Science I Didn't Know I Needed
I am curious by nature. I always have been. So before I did anything else, I started asking questions.
What I learned — and what my neighbor Beverly confirmed almost immediately from memory — is that what I had was a full-blown infestation of Plodia interpunctella, the Indian meal moth. You might know them by their more common name: pantry moths.
These are small moths, barely half an inch across, with a distinctive two-toned wing — pale near the body, a warm reddish-copper toward the tips. They are unremarkable looking, which is part of why most people don't know much about them until they're suddenly everywhere.
Here is the part that surprised me most: the adult moths I was watching fly around my garage were not the problem. They were almost beside the point. Adult Indian meal moths don't eat. Not a bite. They live only one to two weeks, and their sole purpose in that time is to find a mate and lay eggs — up to 400 of them — before they die.
The damage is done by the larvae. Tiny, nearly invisible caterpillars that hatch from eggs already tucked inside the bird seed before it ever reached my shelf. That's right — the eggs likely came home with the bag from the store. The larvae spend weeks feeding inside the grain, spinning barely visible silky threads as they go. By the time the adults emerge and start flying around your garage, the next generation is already quietly at work.
Bird seed is one of their favorite homes. It is natural, unprocessed, full of the seeds, grains, and nuts that pantry moths have been exploiting for thousands of years. Even fresh, well-packaged seed can carry eggs you'd never know were there — too small to see, waiting for the right warmth to hatch.
I had created perfect conditions without knowing it: a warm garage, a box of seed that sat long enough for multiple generations to complete their cycle, and no airtight container to stop the spread. The math is straightforward and humbling. One female, 400 eggs. If even a fraction survive to adulthood, you go from ten moths to fifty in three days.
Beverly Knew
Here is where the story gets better.
I walked across the street to talk to Beverly about what I was dealing with. Beverly is probably ten years older than me, which puts her somewhere in the neighborhood of wisdom I aspire to. She grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, and she has the kind of knowledge that doesn't come from the internet — it comes from a life lived close to the land and to the way things actually work.
I described the moths. She nodded before I finished the sentence.
Pantry moths, she said. Check your bird seed.
She already knew. Of course she did. She had dealt with them on the farm, in the grain stores, in the kitchen. She knew that the key was not just throwing out the infested food but cleaning every crack and corner, because larvae and pupae will anchor themselves in the dark edges of shelves and emerge weeks later to start the whole cycle again. She knew about freezing new seed for a week before storing it — cold kills the eggs before they can hatch. She knew to store everything in hard, airtight containers, because moth larvae can chew through thin plastic bags and cardboard like it's nothing.
In ten minutes, Beverly taught me more about pantry moths than I could have learned in an hour of searching on my own. And she did it the way the best teaching always happens — as a conversation between neighbors, standing in the driveway on a warm morning, neither of us in any particular rush to be anywhere else.
What the Moths Were Really About
I got rid of the moths. It took some work — throwing out the bird seed, vacuuming the shelves carefully, wiping everything down, starting over with seed stored in a sealed metal canister. The garage is quiet again. The feeder is full. The birds are back.
But I keep thinking about that week, and it's not the moths I keep thinking about.
It's Beverly.
It's the fact that I am 64 years old and I still had something completely new to learn — something I had never encountered in six decades of living. It's the fact that the answer was across the street the whole time, living in the memory of a woman who grew up watching her family manage exactly this problem on a Pennsylvania farm fifty years ago. It's the fact that none of that knowledge would have reached me if I had just looked it up online and gone back inside.
There is something about getting older that can make a person feel like the learning years are behind them. Like you've covered the major topics, read the important books, figured out most of what you need to know. The moths reminded me how wrong that feeling is. The world is endlessly specific. There is always something you haven't encountered yet, some small miracle or small disaster that will demand you pay attention and ask questions.
And there are people all around you who know things you don't. People who grew up differently, lived differently, worked different land and different kitchens and different lives. Their knowledge is extraordinary, and most of it never gets written down anywhere. It lives in conversations — in the kind of exchange that only happens when you walk across the street instead of reaching for your phone.
An Invitation
Get out of your house. Go talk to your neighbors. Share a story, a meal, a drink on the porch. Ask questions you don't know the answer to. Listen to people who are older than you, and to people who are younger. Be curious about the small things — the moths in your garage, the bird at your feeder, the way your neighbor's face changes when she recognizes something you don't.
Life does not get any better than this. Not the moths — the moths were a nuisance — but this: still learning at 64, still being surprised, still finding out that the person across the street has exactly the wisdom you needed on exactly the right morning.
Every day is a gift. The question is whether you open it.
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