A few days before Thanksgiving, my husband and I finally moved our indoor plants back indoors. In years past we brought them inside in late September, just to be safe, because in those days frost often fell in early October, and a killing freeze inevitably came by the end of the month. This year, the first killing freeze finally came on Nov. 30, our latest first freeze in history. My indoor plants have become outdoor plants for all but four months of the year.

The day we dragged the indoor plants inside, our backyard oak was clinging to the last of its russet leaves, but the maples had long since dropped their bounty of red and orange and gold. Their leaves still blanket the yard, making a refuge where insects and their larvae will overwinter. Left outdoors all fall, the potted ficus had acquired its own blanket of windfall leaves. I didn’t brush them away before moving the plant inside. I figured their moldering would make good food for this aging tree, which I bought for my college apartment in 1983.

Those leaves at the base of the ficus were sheltering an invertebrate resident, too, it turns out. Perhaps confused by the warmth of our family room, a small white moth soon climbed out of the leaf litter and crawled to the edge of the pot. I made a hollow of my hands, careful not to touch its powdery wings, and carried it outside, setting it down in a potted plant that stays outdoors all winter, its own leafy blanket intact.

I didn’t recognize the moth and didn’t think to take a photo of it, either. Trying so hard to get it outside safely, I didn’t even pause to look it over carefully before scooping it up. Identifying it later without a visual referent proved impossible. Was it a fall webworm moth? A white flannel moth? A satin moth?

I still don’t know, so I couldn’t tell you how rare the moth I saved might be. I know I didn’t save it for long. Most moths in Tennessee overwinter as eggs or pupae or caterpillars; the adults die with the first freeze. You could ask why I took such care to rescue the tiny hitchhiker at all, and it would be a fair question. My yard should have gone cold weeks ago. That moth had already outlived nature’s allotted time.

I have spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in this direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers that grow in our yard when all the emerald yards nearby are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why trouble myself to keep the stock-tank ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs who might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect nocturnal creatures when all around me the houses are lit up like airport runways? Why bother to plant saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I are gone, to make room for yet another foolishly large house that glows in the dark?