A few weeks ago, I was sitting up late with the laptop, finishing up the final changes to my manuscript. (Yep. It's done. 298 pages are right now sitting on my kitchen table, ready to be mailed in for publishing attempt #1. And I will send it in. As soon as I get the nerve. And write a decent cover letter. And cry. And pull off all my finger nails. And wail, and gnash my teeth.) Good grief, I am easily distracted. I didn't even want to talk about writing in this post. I'd much rather talk about bugs. Because that is what I was dealing with that night that I was up late. Tiny, winged bugs that kept falling out of the sky and plopping onto various parts of my laptop screen and person. Except they weren't falling out of the sky, because I was inside. IN MY HOUSE. A house that has solid walls, a roof, and no open windows. So I was a little freaked out. Because bugs falling onto my laptop screen means there are bugs getting into my house. In large enough quantities that it all felt a bit like an opening scene in a horror movie.
Naturally, I turned to the internet to solve my little buggy woes. In a matter of minutes, I knew exactly what the bugs were, and what I could do to get rid of them.
Winged ants. Nothing.
What?! Nothing? Yeah, nothing. Here's how it works... once a year, this particular kind of ant releases thousands upon thousands of teeny tiny winged ants (I mean, really tiny...barely bigger than a gnat), sending them into the wilderness to find new places to colonize and build new homes. Unfortunately for me, my house is right in the middle of the wilderness. The swarming lasts about three days, and then they all die, hopefully after finding a new place to set up camp and sending word back to their nonwinged counterparts on where to go. I'm good with that. Go, colonize, fulfill the measure of your creation. And know that if you come inside my house, I will squash you.
Just as Google predicted, the little buggers disappeared after a few more days. Even still, the entire experience awakened my senses to the challenges of literally carving a homestead out of the side of a mountain. I mean, I can't really be frustrated. All that nature was here first, wasn't it? Maybe the wasps are incessant about building a nest behind our basketball goal because when we built our house last year, we cut down the tree where they used to live. The ants, the bees and wasps, the poison ivy, the weeds that grow faster than I can pull them... a year ago, they all lived here, unhindered by my presence.
I will still kill ants that come in my house, and destroy wasp nests that threaten my children, and kill the poison ivy that turns me into an itchy, miserable mess. But I will also remember that um, I live in the woods. And the woods are full of bugs.
But... the woods are also full of honeysuckle that makes my entire backyard smell good in the spring. Wild flowers grow in abundance, enticing butterflies of every possible shape and color. Wild rabbits and chattering squirrels are constantly darting in and out of the shrubs. The kids can almost always head outside and find a box turtle, or a toad to entertain and enlighten their curious minds. And then, on rare occasions, you might even catch a glimpse of this:
I took that picture from my living room window.
I absolutely still hate bugs, but living in the woods isn't so horrible after all.
