Eaten Alive

by Donna Schoenkopf

There's always a trade-off.

When something's important to you, you have to give up something else.

There is no God.

If I were God I would make sure everyone had a happy, fulfilled life. All positive, no negative.

But, alas, that is not the way things work in this universe.

So, my Life List has things I want very, very, VERY much and things I'm willing to put up with in order to get them.

I want to live in the country. I want to be able to afford it and not go into debt. I want Nature around me. I want Beauty, with a capital B, I want peace and quiet, I want to be healthy, I want the Earth to be healthy. Among other things.

So what do I give up?

Pesticides, chemical fertilizers, Clorox, the corporate world as much as I can, plastic bags, Styrofoam, a big honker car, etc. etc.

But I am being challenged. As I've said previously there is a trade-off.

Here's the deal:

When the world warms up here in Oklahoma, good things happen. Everything gets green. The air is soft. The land glows with life—wildflowers, birds, trees, grass, YUCCA plants, for God's sake! It is magnificent.

With all this life force going on, the world of insects, spiders, and fungi is awakened, too.

Now, I've been a brave little girl through the last two onslaughts of these things. But this year I'm realizing that this whole magilla is getting to be not a challenge, all courageous and exciting, but a goddamn bore and and a chore. With a few interesting new experiences.

Shall we begin with spiders?

Sure, why not.

Let's begin this way:

Every year is different. Just as different wildflowers erupt in different places, and different trees show their different seedling selves in different places, spiders are the same.

Over the past two summers out here at Chigger Lake I have watched whole new hordes of spiders erupt.

This year it is a small, black, furry jumping spider. It has teal green/blue mandibles, a really gorgeous color. It is kind of like a cute little teddy bear.

Here is a link to jumping spider pictures. The species I have is the one with the pretty blue mandibles.

Cute, huh?

They are EVERYWHERE! I'm not kidding. They are on the walls, on the floor, on the kitchen counter, in the bathroom. I don't see them as roving herds. They are single operators. But there isn't a day that I don't see at least a handful.

Hmmm. An unfortunate choice of words.

A few days ago, seriously, I found one INSIDE my refrigerator on the side wall, perky as could be.

They are not poisonous and they do eat insects and web-building spiders, but for some unknown (at least to me) reason this has been a very good year for their species. This is the first year that I've seen such a preponderance of one species. I mean I hardly see any other kind of spider. I guess they've eaten them.

So. That's the spider situation.

Insects:

I cannot leave the glass sliding doors open at night with just the screen door as a barrier between me and the outdoor world anymore. And it's a real shame. The air outside is cool and fresh and delicious. BUT those damn insects can find their way in like nothing I've ever seen. If I open the door for a few seconds to let Diego the Dog and Angela Davis the Dog out to bark at the coyotes or the moon or the snap of a twig, those insects find their way in. I don't see them do it, but when I turn around to climb back into my comfy bed to continue watching teevee, I see the wall next to my bedside lamp covered with every kind of moth and gnat and tiny little thing and medium sized thing and HUGE thing there.

Now, most people would move right out. Sell the house and move back to the city. But I don't even consider it because my wonderful mama taught me at an early age that insects were interesting and cute. She used to set me on the floor next to the back door screen to watch the flies on it. “Look!” she would say. “See how cute they are? They wash their little faces.” And they do, you know. She told me that when they were in her house she would open the door and gently talk to them and guide them outside.

Yes. She was a saint. And she also believed in fairies.

But I digress.

So unless I am very careful, I have a wall of insects on the wall next to, and over, my bed. Nice.

What to do?

I found that my spray bottle of lavender oil mixed with water, with which I spray my sheets and blankets and pillows every night so that insects don't invade my bed, works on my wall-of-bugs. (And it smells heavenly.) Yes, it kind of stops them in their tracks, sort of, but if they get too wet they stick to the wall and then I've got a mess. I have to wipe the wall down. In the morning. I am NOT doing this at 11:30 at night. They're not going anywhere.

This summer is different than the past two summers, unless it is too early to judge. After all, it IS only May. In the past, the insects were so loud at night that I literally had to turn the teevee way up in order to hear it. There must have been billions out there. A wall of sound, and I'm not kidding. People who came for dinner and would step outside at the end of the evening to get into their cars to go home would remark about how loud they were. (They were polite enough not to JUMP into their cars screaming and peeling off down the gravel road.)

This year the insects are moderate in their choral music.

And ticks. Not as bad as the last two summers. (But again, maybe it's just too early to tell. Or maybe it's climate change.) I don't find thirty a day on Diego or Angela Davis. I only find four or five or six. And I don't find any between their toes.

THAT is nice!

But I did find one in my bed the other day, a little guy, making his way over the white expanse of my sheet. And I do have a welt or two every morning from God knows what.

Then there are the spittlebugs. Last week I wrote about the strange clusters of white foam on the stalks of wildflowers and clover and grasses. Dear Editor Nathan, being a curious kind of guy, must have looked it up and sent a link about spittlebugs with a lovely picture of one of them. [Nah. I already knew about them. I've got them here in L.A. - Ed.] They are pretty fancy. They are orange and black and beetle-like. Not a gross bug at all. Then Judy wrote to say that horseflies do the same thing and to find out what it is, just smoosh around in the cluster and you'll find out what's making them.

So I went outside and smooshed around inside the cluster of foam and there, THERE! Was a spittlebug. Just like the picture Nathan sent me. It was fully formed and pretty big and had half a kind of gestational carapace of some sort covering it. It was a spittlebug.

So all those clusters of foam contain spittlebugs. Millions of them. I have hairy black jumping spiders and spittlebugs here at Chigger Lake.

Grasshoppers. I have lots of grasshoppers but NOTHING like what I had last summer. Last summer hundreds and hundreds of little tiny baby green grasshoppers, the cutest things you've ever seen, would jump out of the grass as I walked through it.

They then proceeded to eat all the leaves off my poor apple trees. And the cottonwoods. And just about everything else.

But this year, not so many.

And finally, the worst invader of all. Ringworm.

Yeah. It makes me shudder, too. I hate ringworm.

But, just to reassure you, ringworm is not a worm. It is a fungus that likes to eat dead skin. On your pets or you. Which is why I am writing about this. I have gotten ringworm. I am treating it with chemicals. From the doctor. It is going away. I took my cat to the vet to see if she is a carrier. She isn't. The vet asked if I garden. I said yes, even though what I do out there is not exactly gardening. He said that that's where I got it and that eventually I will develop an immunity to it. I think he talks from experience.

But I just bought a Woods Lamp on Amazon, which is a black light dealy which shows ringworm fungi when you darken the room.

I can't wait to get it. I'm gonna shine that baby all over my house and my cats and my dogs and my clothes and my bed and my furniture and THEN I'm gonna spray CLOROX ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE!

So. Clorox. And prescription drugs. And chemicals.

Damn.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

Like I said, it's all a trade-off.

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