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The University of Missouri Enns Entomology Museum is a research and teaching resource housed in the Division of Plant Sciences. The museum houses over six million insect specimens, making it one of the largest and most significant entomological collections in the central United States.

Six million specimens in a room you could cross in thirty seconds.

They are arranged on pins, which turn into drawers, which turn into stacks, which turn into cabinets, which turn into rows of cabinets that line every wall from floor to ceiling. The order of it is total, obsessive, a little frightening. Six million is not a number you can hold in your mind, so you stop trying and just look at the one in front of you.


































































To be raised by natural scientists is to sit around the dinner table and have your mother explain that the magnesium in the broccoli you've skillfully hidden in the folds of your napkin came from the soil. She says that one day you will give it back. She tells you that every religion says that we begin and end as dirt.  

It is here that she requests her body in death be buried, not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the Earth. So that flora and fauna may dine upon her just as shes dined upon flora and fauna throughout her life.