Comparing Regional Glitches

We have moved 12 times, an Army life; different states, sometimes different countries and after all this travel, I can tell you there is something good about everywhere, and often, less advertised, something bad.  The bad part is often downplayed.  When we were stationed at Ft Drum near Watertown NY, a place that routinely got about 12 feet of snow each winter, the forecast never called for a blizzard, or extremely heavy snow, something that the DC area was ready to announce if 5” of snow were in the forecast.  Rather, we were often expecting “snow showers”- showers that typically clocked in at 4’ a throw.  By midwinter, you couldn’t see out the first floor windows.  A hobbit-like, lump of a snowdrift was what the house became.. I loved it!  Others, all those Southerners the Army seemed to delight in sending there were ready to shoot their refrigerators.

When we lived in Albuquerque the weather was often forecasted to be “breezy”, code for, put weight belts on the kids or they will blow away during recess. Even the Cape, which was my closest thing to Paradise Lost, had ticks and mold in the summer, (for those of us without AC and a husband reluctant to turn on fans). 

 

 And now, here I am in Texas, proclaimed by every Texan I have every known, to be “Heaven on Earth”, “God’s country”, etc. etc.  The weathermen love to say, “We are in for a beautiful day” and then proceed to tell me that “beautiful day” will feature temps in the high 90’s.

Spring on the Cape would see me with Scotch tape in hand, picking ticks off the dog and then sealing them in tape, getting about 15 off each morning before I went to work.  This morning, I spent an hour cutting burs out of his coat.

TX has to be the “Burr capital of the world”, something never mentioned in the brochures.  My yard is a sea of Burr clover, so green in the spring that I am loathe to pull it up, and isn’t clover great at recharging the soil with nitrogen?  But when each plant produces hundreds of hundreds of burrs that all attach to my dog, my socks, etc., it is less appreciated.  Yesterday I pulled a wheelbarrow full of “stick tights” out before they reached seed stage and Malta Star thistle likes to come back 2 fold for each one I pull.  And they hurt quite a bit. But not as bad as Buffalo burr that not only pricks but also must add a dose of something else so you feel like you have been stung by something.  “God’s country”, hmmmm.

I have my first chigger bite of the season, nothing that “Chiggar rid” or “Sting Eze” can really alleviate.  And you never see it coming, where was the chigger, could I have brushed it off?  No, because it must wear some invisibility cloak, you only know it got you hours after it gets you.  Days and nights of itching ensue.   The Fire ant bites I had the misfortune of getting last week, are just now subsiding.  My “stealth mosquitoes” are back, amazingly small, making no mosquito whining sound so you never see them coming, and apparently able to go through their 4 stages of development in a nanosecond. No rain, but here they are, my watering perhaps provided a puddle on a leaf and they somehow managed to multiply there.

But then, nowhere is perfect.  Even Hawaii has the off chance of you getting taken out by undertows or a pesky volcano making a mess of things. As a Yeah God person I have a feeling “Heaven on Earth” is a bit of a misnomer, Heaven in heaven is probably the only place that description fits.

 OK, enough ranting, back to burr picking.  May your May be less prickly and itchy than mine is.