You know the truth is out there.

The weather in beautiful Ellesiouville was a bit unusual last week. Monday and Tuesday were lovely; I did not wear my usual turtleneck-sweatshirt combo. Wednesday the rain began to fall but the temperature was still comfortable. Thursday was again pleasant, but then two inches of snow fell overnight. The freezing temperatures coupled with Thursday's rain gave us about a quarter of an inch of ice under that snow. I pulled out my long undies for what I hoped was the last time and set off for work on Friday morning.

To set the background for this story, I ask you, dear readers, to think about what happens in spring when warm rain follows warm days. In particular, please think about the sidewalks.

Yes, indeed. It was an earthworm holocaust on Thursday. Earthworm death and destruction on every cold, hard surface to be found, all the way up the steps to each building. There were portions of the sidewalks so thickly covered with earthworms that it was impossible to pass without mashing one or more into the concrete. I confess that I am one of those people who rescue stranded earthworms. I witnessed so much earthworm misery on my way to the office from the parking garage that I could not bear to walk across campus for the rest of the day. I stayed in my office and starved.

On Friday, however, I could not resist the clam chowder in the faculty club. (Why is the Friday soup du jour always clam chowder?) I set off across campus, a route that took me across one of the longest sidewalks traversing the Quad.

The ice had mostly melted from this narrow passage between two immense swards. It was coated with the limp and slimy corpses of innumerable earthworms, those trampled underfoot the day before and those caught in the ice and snow overnight. I could not simply walk down the sidewalk; I was forced to perform a clumsy dance to avoid, literally, treading on corpses to get to my clam chowder.

But this is not the point of my story. The point is this: not all the worms were dead. Quite to the contrary, many of them were quite alive -- squirmy, juicy and fat alive. I ask you, dear reader, to contemplate this. I have four hypotheses, and I think we all know which one provides the best explanation for this phenomenon:

1. The live worms struggled up through the ice and snow to bask in the cold air after a freak Midwestern snowstorm.
2. The CIA and the NSA flew over campus early Friday morning to dump bushels of live earthworms over the LSU campus.
3. The previously frozen earthworms were thawing out and wriggling away.
4. ZOMBIE EARTHWORMS WERE FEEDING ON THEIR OWN DEAD.