Chiggers

by Donna Schoenkopf

My legs are a mass of chigger bites.

I got these chigger bites by working in my “yard,” the yard I haven’t mowed since 2008. Yes, I’ve weed-whacked it. And I water it almost every day. And I plant things in it. But as far as having an actual lawnmower to cut the grass a nice even height ... no.

So you can imagine its appearance. Tall grass. Kinda rough looking. Natural. I think it’s pretty with its wildflowers abounding and its greenness glowing. It sure is a better sight than the orange-red clay/mud that I used to see when I looked out my sliding glass doors. As I look lovingly at the greenness, I say to myself that any plant life that chooses to grow here gets my blessing. (Except for nettles.)

And so plants sprouted their little sprouts and spread their little leaves and dug in their little roots. Now I have a lawn of many grasses mingling across the formerly naked baked clay. There’s Johnson grass, and Bermuda, and clover, and crabgrass. (I love the crabgrass the most. It’s hardy and a fabulous green that doesn’t brown up like the bermuda and it spreads with vigor. It’s soft to the touch when walked on, too.) These happy communities of groundcover blend and swirl around each other. It’s very pretty. To me, anyway.

But, as the Doctors Zerin used to say to me in therapy, nothing is all black or all white. My wild and wonderful lawn is host to ... chiggers.

They love tall grass. They love hot and humid days. They love ... me. They love me so much they just want to eat me up. And they do.

When I first realized I had chigger bites, I had a vision of tiny, spidery, red chiggers, the size of the point of a pin, burrowing under my skin and laying eggs hither, thither and yon over the mountains and valleys of my heaving flesh.

But this is not reality. It is folklore.

So a little lesson on chiggers:

Chiggers are the larval stage of Trombiculidae, which are mites that inhabit virtually every place on Earth, but really love hot and humid places. Like Oklahoma.

The mite lays eggs in the ground when temperatures remain steady at or above 60 degrees. That would be spring around here. The larval stage—chiggers—is the only one in which they are parasites. They’ll bite amphibians, birds, and mammals. Anything with skin.

Wikipedia says, “Chiggers attach to the host, pierce the skin, inject enzymes into the bite wound that digest cellular contents, and then suck up the digested tissue through a tube formed from hardened skin cells, called the stylostome.” Just think of a stylostome as a giant straw. And this straw stays in the flesh of the bitee. Itching.

I feel like a giant Juicy Juice box.

They do not burrow under the skin or lay eggs there.

They eat skin. They do not drink blood.

But I was right about their being tiny little guys. About the size of the point of a pin. You don’t see them. They are red. They are spidery. They are hairy. (This part of my vision turned out to be correct.)

Folklore says to paint the resulting welts with clear fingernail polish to suffocate the embedded chiggers. But this piece of information is bogus. The only benefit from painting your chigger bites with clear nail polish is to keep you from scratching the tops of the welts off, trying to get at the itch.

So, believing the folklore, I bought some clear fingernail polish after suffering egregiously for several weeks, and by egregiously I mean INTENSE itching, the kind that makes it okay to tear away chunks of flesh just to get at that pin point of exquisite itching that nothing will satisfy except getting down, down, down to its point of origin and somehow releasing its power. It’s something like an orgasm. An orgasm that never happens. An orgasm that happens all over your body and cannot be satisfied. You’d think it would be extremely pleasurable. But no. It just drives you insane.

When a person itches that intensely the consequence to the body is a landscape, or should I say bodyscape, of various states of bites. Some swollen and red and luscious, like a ripe fruits. Some scratched into the temporary submission of scabs. Some bites that have the tops scratched off ooze yellowy, clear liquid that turns out to be the digested bits and enzymes the chigger had injected into your poor old body.

Ewwwwwwwww.

Mostly my legs are affected. But other areas of itching and bites are the tops of my feet, the hamstring area just above the back of my heels, my stomach, the backs of my knees, my buttocks, and under the huge and floppy breasts of my 67-year-old body.

Lovely. Just lovely.

Well, I’m not someone who bows to discomfort and usually just try to live with things that gnaw at me, but finally, FINALLY, I had had enough.

After I bought the fingernail polish and found that it didn’t work, I resorted to a tube of mysterious cream my dermatologist prescribed for a mysterious rash that I had developed a couple of months ago which I thought was ringworm, but was not. His words were something like, “It’s not ringworm. I don’t know what it is but this will cure it. Whatever it is.”

So I applied it to my bites. The thick white paste covered almost my whole body. The itching stopped. Temporarily. Like maybe for half an hour. But then resumed.

I tried Neosporin, the antibiotic. No relief. Slapping them. Nothing. Caladryl lotion. Fuggeddaboudit.

Nights were horrible. As I lay on my bed watching my neverending TV shows I found myself unconsciously scratching, scratching, SCRATCHING, until my whole body throbbed as one gigantic itch.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

I knew I did not want any more chigger bites. They weren’t little annoyances I could overcome by sheer will power. Nahhh. They were from HELL.

But I had to mow my lawn because my darling grandson and his mom and his cousins were coming and I would feel horrendous guilt having them walking through my tall, chigger-ridden grass and picking up souvenir chiggers to take to Tennessee.

I had a brand new electric, corded lawnmower. A lawnmower so wonderful that it sang as it cut the grass. A lawnmower so sweet that I could feel its love beaming at me while I walked behind it watching the grass smooth out and look like a piece of civilization.

But what about the chiggers? Huh? What about THEM??

I had bought a can of Off, a DEET formula for keeping insects off your tender hide, to spray my loved ones with when I took them for their tour of Chigger Lake.

So, even though I HATE the stuff, and because the lavender and lemon and eucalyptus combinations didn’t really work out there in Chigger Land, I sprayed my legs with Off, put on long socks to my knees, put on sweatpants with the elasticized ankles even though it was over 100 degrees and HUMID, sprayed my pants, put on a longsleeved shirt, BUTTONED at the wrists, put on my Tomboy’s baseball cap that I got from son John when he worked there in Manhattan Beach on his first job, donned my prescription sunglasses, and stepped outside.

There is no way to know whether any chiggers bit me that day. The bites don’t disappear that quickly. They can last up to two weeks or so. All I know is that when I was finished with my lawnmowing and had stripped and jumped into the cool water of my outdoor shower and had started drying off, I realized that every bite I had put clear fingernail polish on had turned a horrible shade of purple.

It’s the purple of bruises. Of rotted fruit. Of varicose veins.

Oh, crap.

Something in the man-made chemicals of Deet and clear fingernail polish combined to make exquisitely ugly blotches all over my poor self.

WILL THIS HELL NEVER END???

Then last night as I scratched endlessly while I watched C-SPAN, I finally realized what the one true way to keep from getting bit by chiggers is. It is to wear what cowboys out here in Oklahoma wear—long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the wrist, jeans, socks, boots, and hats. They wear this outfit every single day. Hot? Wear it anyway. It’s better than chigger bites. It’s better than DEET. And it’s not as hot as you think it will be.

So, today, this lovely Sunday, I look out of my many glass sliding doors at the growing grass, now kind of unkempt and rough, and I itch to mow it.

But only in the metaphorical sense.

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