ticks

last night I had a dream that dozens of ticks were embedded in my skin… mostly the insidious little ones, the dreaded nymphs. The finale of the dream was finding an engorged tick in my hair – it was the size of a grape. I share this information here, not to repulse you, but to reveal a significant element in our current life… ticks. For those who might be unfamiliar, ticks are little spidery-crab-creepy bugs that love to eat blood. They crawl aboard while you are enjoying a picnic, hiking through pastoral paradise, or petting your good old dog. Once aboard, they bury their heads beneath your skin and extract a blood meal. Uninterrupted, they will gorge themselves until their bodies swell up, rendering their legs completely useless. This whole horror show is euphemistically called a “tick bite”. When you find one that has ” bitten” you see only its torso and rump, oriented as though still trying to dive deeper into your body, following the head which is not visible beneath your skin. When you pull the tick off, a discernible tug of war takes place as it fiendishly tries to hold on for more tasty bloodmeal. I won’t go into the details of the next step, which is killing them, but suffice it to say that graphic popping or burning is required. Many ticks carry lime disease so our level of tick vigilance is high, not just because they are disgusting, but because they can make you chronically ill. Despite my dislike of ticks, I am somewhat impressed with their strategy.

Poor Faucet usually takes the brunt of the constant tick offensive.