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Pandemic Journey Day 52

May 12, 2020

Today’s image – In life, there are takeaways, and then there are TAKEAWAYS. My hallowed ground, wildlife refuge trip sent me off with a significant takeaway, and one that took most of my attention today – deer ticks! Only minutes into that walk along the levee, I was commending my good providence for hiking on the slough on such a beautiful but chilly day, and glibly remarking to myself about the absence of mosquitoes.  My comeuppance arrived around 9:00 pm last night as I noticed a little tickle of something moving across my hand. I looked up from my book – augghhhh! TICK! TICK! TICK!  The red lights in my brain flashed as the sirens of my amygdala screamed.  I search my arms and legs; I felt around my scalp and armpits. I looked at my pup, and a primal nitpicking session commenced as I combed his fur and my head with frantic fingers.  Dozens of ticks had hitchhiked home on us from the tall marsh grasses. Before retiring, I stripped down and re-searched every crevice.  Still at 3:00 am, they woke me like a bad dream, and I was picking ticks from my pillow and sheet and more from my dog, telling myself here was the reciprocity of the marsh, an eye for an eye and a parasite for a parasite.  With the finest of aversions, I was participating in a relationship that predates humans by one hundred million years.  Yes, the ticks came first, some say, out of the Cretaceous Period. Maybe my loathing of them is a trained one, and perhaps it’s not the ticks that I am so fearful of but the pathogens that they carry and pass along.

Given the mild-ish winter we experienced, I hear that insect populations will be impressive this summer, and from the looks of things, so will arachnids. They will be food for something we appreciate more, I suppose. And also conveyance for microbes that bring illnesses to complicated matters in this COVID shakedown. Here is more writing on the wall; this is not a great way to end a school year or start the summer season.  I am feeling like loose change in a flush eco-economy.


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