David Heiller
You can straddle the fence on a lot of subjects, but one thing which everyone has an opinion about is woodticks. One person may rejoice in torturing them, the next wouldn’t live in the same state as one.
Woodticks are no laughing matter to many people, including my mother-in-law and her dog, Muffin.
Muffin, as the name implies, is a poodle mix. She measures about 15 inches long, weighs maybe eight pounds after a haircut. In other words, she’s only slightly bigger than some of the well-fed woodticks of northern Minnesota.
Muffin came for a visit last weekend, along with a bunch of other family members. She sprang from the car warily, her gray fur cut short, and a pink ribbon tied in a bow on top of her head. Binti, our dog, (followed her around as she staked her territory at several spots in the yard, as dogs (even poodles) are wont to do.
From the very beginning; Muffin seemed to keep ‘one eye on the house at all times while she explored outside: She may have remembered the day two years ago when we were walking up the road past the neighbors, and their shepherd/husky mistook her for a large gray squirrel or rabbit. Muffin emerged from that mismatch with a punctured lung and some broken ribs. She didn’t leave the yard this last visit.
In fact, she didn’t leave the house much. But still, the omni-present woodtick radared in on her. Sunday morning, despite an aerosol spray with anti-tick stuff, she had a woodtick on her nose. It was so small, we couldn’t get it out with our fingers and had to use a tweezers. Lorely, my wife’s mother, wouldn’t even attempt it with her fingers. That prompted a dinner table recollection from Cindy.
“Remember that time I had a woodtick right in the middle of my back?” she said. “I couldn’t reach it, any way I tried. Then I asked you to take it out.” She nodded at her mother. “And you wouldn’t take it out.
“That’s not true, I did too take it out,” Lorely said firmly.
“Yes, but you used a tweezers,” Cindy answered.
“Well I still took it out,” Lorely said in a dignified voice, as if to say, “I may not like ticks, but I wouldn’t leave them sticking in my daughter.”
On the other end of the spectrum, some people like to do battle with woodticks. I visited a friend two weeks ago who has a handful of kids. My dog came with, and nosed up to eight-year-old Josh. Josh began petting Binti, and immediately began pulling ticks off her back. It came as natural as a handshake. “What’s the matter, don’t you take the ticks off your dog;” Josh scolded me as he tossed them aside. I had to admit it was a losing battle.
But nothing tops the time a friend came to visit from Texas. “We hadn’t seen each other for some time, so he started telling me about how things were different in the Lone Star State. I picked up a basketball, and the more buckets we shot, the more he bragged.
“Corn grows so fast down there,” he said, shooting the ball “we have to harvest it with an ax, and even then we have a hard time, because it’s hard to hit the same spot twice, it shoots up so quick.
“And we have to strap old roller skates on the bottom of watermelons so that they don’t tear up the yard when they’re growing on the vine.
“The Mosquitoes, why we just expanded Dulles International Airport to accommodate their landings and take-offs.”
He started to continue, but I cut him off. “What about woodticks?”
He stared at me. “Yeah, what about them?”
I held up the basketball. “You know this thing you thought was a basketball...”
I did t get to finish the sentence. My friend was already halfway out the driveway. I haven’t heard from him since, except for a form-letter Christmas card.
Like I said, most everybody has a story about woodticks. Not all of them are entirely true.
No comments:
Post a Comment