Pastoral Dreams

I've always daydreamed of a living in a house on a little hill with a nearby pond or river, lots of green space, and DSL.
 
OK, I added the broadband spec a few years ago. But the house idea has been with me as long as I can remember.
 
It's not that I'm antisocial. I like my neighbors, at least the ones who don't ply me with multilevel marketing schemes. I just really, really like open green space, where I can see the sunset, or keep some livestock, or plant a garden.
 
I was disabused of that notion this weekend, in the Ozark foothills where my father grew up.
 
Sure, we enjoyed the time we spent playing in the same creek I visited as a kid. The fresh air, solitude, trees—more trees than anyone could count. The tall grass ...
 
Stop right there.
 

 
So, for all my education and accomplishments, professional and personal, I remain a protein source for parasites.

Nearly a week later, I still have no less than a dozen red blotches where these lovely little insect marvels have "injected a digestive enzyme that ruptures the cells" and formed "a sort of straw for sucking the skin cell fluids." I also found six ticks, three of them embedded, and I'm not ashamed to admit I took great pleasure dousing them with hydrogen peroxide before extracting their corpses with a snap.
 
The chiggers, however, are all downside, having already scampered off with a belly full of my skin-cell fluids to escape punishment. The wounds they leave sit dormant until I think about them, when they begin itching again. I scratch around them so as not to aggravate the damage, and it's moments like these that I wish I were a dog and someone would just throw a stick to distract me. Nothing accelerates healing; all I can do is scratch, apply calamine, and wait.
 
Prevention for next time? Here's what the experts have to say:

 
So if I ever do get that house on the hill with the pond and the livestock and the DSL, you can easily pick me out on Google Maps: I'll be traipsing around the property in clown shoes and Hammer pants.
 
And that's another quality-of-life issue denied to me by the suburbs.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 06:38 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 449 words, total size 3 kb.