Unseen uglies and little lovelies.

It's a disgusting little thing, its lumpish white body and its long, twisting tail. Madeleine dug it up from a pool of water and brought it to us with a look of revulsion on her face. "Look at this weird thing," she says. "I wonder what it is."

We all stare and agree it's disgusting, but cool. I tell Madeleine that I want to make a video, so she holds it up to the light. She doesn't want to hold the squirmy thing for very long. Violet is whining about something in the background. It's not a magic nature moment by any stretch, and yet light filters through its nearly translucent skin, illuminating some dark mass of biology inside, and there's something ineffable about it, too. Looking under the surface of things to pull up something dark and unseen, but somehow lovely in its mystery.

I do a little research and find out that the disgusting thing is actually a drone fly larva. That little "tail" is really more like a snorkel, enabling what is essentially a water maggot to breathe in even the murkiest water conditions.

I dig a little deeper to see what the larva turns into and find out it grows into a pretty cool honeybee mimic. And that these little guys are important pollinators of crops and wildflowers. It turns out I actually took a photo of a grown drone fly during the same outing.

Beauty comes from ugly things pretty much all the time, right? You just have to seek it out.