They Come in Fours

They Come in Fours

When I was younger, our family summer vacations inevitably ended up in the Smoky Mountains. We would go for hikes, get the obligatory caramel apple, and stop at the visitors center where they had a collection of stuffed animals and a bookstore. The bookstore visits led to the purchase of a number of Golden Books series on weather, wildlife, plants, and insects, and my father purchased the mother of all books on wildlife: the Reader’s Digest North American Wildlife. The book was like a portal into a new world with color illustrations of the animals, maps showing how much territory its habitat encompassed, and little tidbits about the animals - some interesting and some even shocking.

I learned wonderful facts that I would happily bring up at dinner time like owls poop by hocking up their food (blech), amphiumas are really ugly salamander-ish things, King Fishers burrow in the ground, and - the most interesting to me - armadillos always give birth to quadruplets. Yep. Four kiddos. Identical kiddos. Every. Single. Time. Armadillos are intriguing enough without its offspring being stuck on repeat. Yes, they look like really large and weird roly-polys. Yes, they can give you leprosy (Hanson’s disease in this hemisphere). Yes, they migrated a long way up here to be an invasive species. And, yes, they can jump really high when spooked. Although all of those things are fascinating, the four identical baby ROUSes (Roly-polys of Unusual Size) every single time just gets me.

The reason why this is really interesting or crazy to me isn’t that it is four. Not even the part of it that they are identical because the fertilized egg splits and then splits again. The amazing thing to me is the consistency. Everytime. Every time. Everytime. The consistency helps provide a foil for us incredibly inconsistent human beings. We are anything but consistent. A family finding out that the wife is pregnant have this excitement and fear wrapped up into one emotional frenzy: Is it a boy? Is it a girl? Is it twins? Triplets? Do we need to worry? Can we tell someone before the end of the first trimester? Should we consider bedrest because of earlier complications? The questions go on and on saturated in an emotional intertwining of happy suspense with worry of the unknown. And the armadillo? Just quadruplets (I am sure they are disappointed that they are not born as precocious quadruplets...). Now, after you read this, I really don’t recommend you walk through life with a newly acquired armadillo worldview, but it in an odd way, the amazing things from this odd member of the animal kingdom has to offer helps make us (people, that is) all the more amazing. Microscopic cells divide and divide again; cells replicate through an amazingly complex system and this happens from armadillos and their adorable and identical quadruplets to all flora and fauna we see around us. It is all so amazing and yet it is tragically just ‘old hat’ for an armadillo. Armadillos don’t get to sit around in a local coffee shop or used book store sipping on some fresh brew, pontificating upon the wonders of armadillo-ness and how they wish they could figure out how to put barcodes on their kids because they just can’t tell them apart. And that bizarre foil - the amazing, consistent procreation of just a simple creature that wreaks havoc on flower beds as it digs for tasty grubs or roots - shows just how amazing we are in our consistent inconsistencies. When things don’t go as planned - whether it is something grand that was such a surprise or something horrible that left us heartbroken - may we walk away from it when the cheers or the tears stop and be filled again with awe and wonder at how amazing and grateful we are that life isn’t just programmed with constants and consistencies, but with the unexpected, the surprising, the awe.