Ticks—The Sequel

by Donna Schoenkopf

It’s tick season. The grass is tall and wet. The air is cool and wet. Perfect for ticks.

They are everywhere here at Chigger Lake.

Diego the Dog comes home from Sally the Dog’s house.

(He loves her. And well he should. She’s a pretty little thing, a little bigger than a Jack Russell, brown, with a face like a deer’s. She is an excellent watchdog. ALWAYS barks long, loud and seriously at me when I drive down Cowboy Lane to let Diego know I’m home.)

He hates the car and leaving his love, but his dog love for me wins out and he leaves Sally with a longing look over his shoulder. He refuses to get into the car which he regards as a machine of torture which should never be entered into happily. He runs his own way back to the house. He usually goes through two waterways to get home.

And that’s where he picks up ticks. At least I THINK that’s where he gets most of them.

The first waterway is a bog with tall reeds and clear water. It is behind Sally’s house. He sploshes through that as a short cut home. It has the added benefit of being FUN. He has to negotiate his way through a rusty barbed wire fence, but after two major gashes, the first, a long one, on his side and the second, a deep one, on the top of his head, it has dawned on him that the fence cut him, so he manages it more carefully these days.

Then on to Chigger Lake and the pond. He loves the pond, especially on hot days. He galumphs down to the edge and wades in and then swims around, cooling off, with a big smile on his face.

Up the hill he comes, wet and muddy, to stand on the deck outside the sliding glass door. “I’m ready to come in now!” his expression beams, and his body wriggles happily, so I open the door and he strides lightly and joyfully in and promptly shakes himself from nose to toes all over the concrete floor, leaving yet another Pollack layer of pinkish reddish brown across it.

There are footprints of all the animals on that floor. Mine and the cats’, Diego’s spray of muddy water droplets, and three big, reddish-brown smears where he has lain, still wet, all happy from the pond.

My floor is like a diary of mud. I have regularly mopped the floor with water and various cleaning agents, but getting that color, that HORRIBLE SALMON COLOR, entirely off of, OUT of, the floor is impossible.

But this story is about ticks. So back to the matter at hand.

Diego has taken to wanting me to pick the ticks off of him.

He sidles up to me, leaning his weight against me, with that look of relaxed anticipation on his face. “Pick me clean,” it says.

So I do.

It’s addictive. Like picking blackheads.

We’re like a couple of baboons, I grooming, he being groomed.

I run my hand over his back. Sometimes I can feel a tick immediately. Sometimes it takes more than one casual swipe. The ticks feel like small, flat protuberances, the size and shape of a bell pepper seed, unless I’m really lucky and get a big, juicy one which feels like a small, juicy grape. I move my hands over him—his head, between his big ears, down his neck and chest, his haunches, his legs, between his toes.

After several weeks of tick removal, one day I realized I hadn’t searched between his toes. So I took his front foot in my left hand and spread his two first toes apart. This startled him and he yanked his foot away, but not before I saw a cluster of the little guys dug into the deepest region between his toes. That incited a delicious feeling of discovery in me and I knew that whatever it took, that dog wasn’t going to escape getting his feet picked cleaned.

These days, he has either given up in the foot fight, or he actually enjoys it.

ANYWAY, when I find a tick I slip my fingernail under the its flat body, bring my thumb and thumbnail down to pinch it tightly against my fingernail and, pop!, it’s out. I don’t bother with trying to get the head out. I figure Diego’s lucky to get the daily (and sometimes twice or three times daily) treatment. Holding the tick tightly, and watching its little legs waving, I drop it into the cup of water by my side.

(Last month I was getting between thirty and forty ticks a sitting. I didn’t realize what a crop there was at first and kept heaving my overweight and lethargic body up out of my sitting position on the floor to walk stiffly, each time I got one between my fingers, to the bathroom toilet. I’d drop them into the toilet water. They would spread their legs out and move for a bit, like tiny trawling spiders, until a couple of minutes later, they would stop moving and finally sink to the bottom of the bowl. It took me several groomings before I eventually got it through my thick skull that it might behoove me to have a cup of water nearby to drop the little darlings into. So I got my I AM THE ONLY PERSON HERE WHO REALLY KNOWS WHAT’S HAPPENING coffee cup with the broken handle that my son, Eric, had given me, to use as my depository.)

The process, that drowning of the ticks, is completely unemotional for me. Well, maybe a LITTLE emotional. There IS the sense of satisfaction of a job well-done when I see them there in the toilet water, like shining clean dishes in the dishrack.

Once I deliberately went down, in my mind’s eye, to a tick in the bowl, felt its fight for life, and quickly got out of there because I DID feel a connection to its struggle and responsibility for its death. That is why I try, and SUCCEED, in not getting too emotionally attached.

A couple of times, because I am a good environmentalist (“If it’s yellow, let it mellow!”) and have a small septic system, I let my bright orange-yellow, B Vitamin-infused urine remain in the bowl and watch how the ticks react to it.

(They react pretty much the same way, urine or no, in case you wanted to know for your own personal store of important information.)

What pleasure, though, sitting with Diego, gently feeling over and through his coarse dark hair. His eyes close in pleasure and relaxation.

He has begun the habit of wanting to sniff each tick after it’s pulled off. I hold it between my fingers and he takes a long, delicious sniff. Sometimes he makes a toothy move to extricate it from between my fingers, but I’ve not let him do this. So far.

A couple of months ago, my dear Betsy, who works for a vet in Kansas, sent me two GIANT boxes of tick repellent for dogs, enough to last forever. She said it was outdated, but who knows, maybe would be just fine, and I could try it out.

What a gift! (It costs almost $50.00 for a three month supply of Frontline. This was going to save me a mint. I might add, it was a BEAUTIFULLY packaged package.)

So I read the directions, applied it and ... Nothing happened. Ah, shit. It HAD lost its power. Diego STILL had tons of ticks on him.

So I waited a couple of weeks or so and went to the vet’s and the office manager, my sweet and generous friend, recommended Frontline and a tick collar, which she uses on her dog, who also swims in HER pond several times a day, and SHE says she only sees a tick every once in a while.

I followed the procedures. And it worked. For about two weeks. It’s supposed to last a month.

This week, jeez, was that dog loaded. Those ticks were hungry. They had obviously been missing mealtime while the Frontline was working, and I began to find them in the house.

Crawling up the wall behind my bed. Crawling over the concrete floor.

I’m not heeby-jeeby about it anymore. They are no more disgusting to me than any other insect nowadays. (I am notoriously unafraid of insects, thanks to my sainted mother who taught me the fine art of insect watching and appreciation.)

But I am beginning to feel phantom ticks on my skin these days. Especially in bed at night. I feel a little tickle. Quickly I raise my tee shirt. Nothing. Then I feel a tiny sharpness. Nothing there. Then I begin to feel a couple of sensations here and there, and then more, and then dozens of tickles and pokes. Nothing. Nothing. Then, occasionally, I am rewarded.

HEY! I got one.

So that occasional tick bite keeps me from dismissing all the pings and pongs on my skin. Luckily I can drop off to sleep quickly and be done with it!

I am going to make an oil, composed of Vitamin E oil, lemon, and eucalyptus oil, to rub on my skin before bed. I wonder if the local health food store has eucalyptus oil. I know it will keep me tick free and relaxed in my beddie.

Two last things, and they have nothing to do with ticks, but are a nice way to remember that the world is not composed entirely of the man-dog-tick story.

This first is the finding of a baby turtle a few days ago. I wanted you to see his picture. Isn’t he the cutest thing you ever saw?

And today, as I was relishing my morning in bed, coffee cup in hand, watching “Morning Joe” and his loud and disturbing diatribe against my boy, Obama, I heard a thud. A minute or two went by. Then it registered. A bird must have hit the glass. I got up and, sure enough, there it lay on the deck.

It was the prettiest blue. And so very small. I reached down and gently picked it up. Its little eyes were closed. But I felt it move in my hand. I cradled it to my pendulous, old lady breasts, and felt a vague stirring. In the bird. Not in my breasts. After several minutes it moved a little more and opened its still-dazed eyes. I opened my hand to let it fly away but it didn‘t move.

Back to my heart. Cradle, cradle, cradle. Its feet slightly grasped my finger. I took it out to the cottonwood tree and it instinctively took hold of a tiny branch. It sat there with its eyes closed. I unhooked it, brought it back in, put it in a basket padded with soft underwear, and placed a basket lid on top. After some minutes of Joe Scarborough-Bob Shrum repartee, I took off the lid and out it flew. It banged against the living area wall and then found the rafters of my house. It would leave its perch and fly here and there, looking for escape.

Both cats eyed it with glee and followed its every move.

I opened every door (there are nine) and waited.

For about half an hour.

And JUST NOW, as I sat here typing, it found its way out, flew like a jet out the door and up into the tall oak tree at the edge of my gravel driveway. I can see its little self now ... that pretty, pretty blue, against the green leaves of the tree.

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