By the age of 5, Phyllis could understand the conversations of insects. Phyllis’ unusual talent brought with it a degree of solitude, which further fuelled her interest in entymology, and the solitude and the entymology chased each other in increasing circles.

She peered into the 6-legged world and listened to its dramas, its triumphs and its turmoils, the way lonely old ladies listened to radio soaps. The mantises taught patience and ruthlessness; the bees were professors of politics; the ants were Marxists; the spiders taught feminism (and some domination and bondage skills).

But it was only much later, long after she’d lost her ear for insect language, that Phyllis remembered the lesson of age. She learned it at 10, overhearing a 9-day-old aphid nymph telling a 5-day-old nymph about “life experience.”
9 days! thought little Phyllis. Ha! Wait til they’re 10 years old!
When she was 35, she overheard teenagers sighing about their age. Like aphids, she thought, except that aphids only live for a month.