Moveable feast
posted in Alaska, Holidays and Festivals |That’s what I am.
To the mosquitoes.
OmegaDad, on the other hand, is not.
This is hugely frustrating. I can remember, as a child, the same thing occurring with my father. My mother and I would be eaten alive, and dad would be bite-free. Now, as we hang out in the yard, the mosquitoes find any nook and cranny that isn’t slathered with Off, and take yet another step on the journey of life, sex, and death.
I suppose it’s a small consolation that I am providing the seed money, as it were, for yet another generation of voracious insects.
We’ve been quietly (or not so quietly) enjoying the yard this Fourth of July weekend.
First, there was the Quest for Lilacs. One of the things I remember most of growing up in the Chicago area is that springtime was a time of lilacs. You’d walk down a street and encounter a huge old lilac plant, and the scent would be strong enough to make you stop, close your eyes, and lean into it, breathing deeply through the nose. Sometimes, it was so alluring that you’d walk right up to the lilac bush (almost a tree), and bury your head in the blossoms. With the eyes closed, your senses would focus on the scent and the soft caress of a springtime breeze and the hypnotic sound of the bees hovering around the flowers.
It turns out that this area of Alaska is prime for lilacs. This does not surprise me, as–aside from the mountains, which are, admittedly, kind of hard to ignore, and aside from the spruce, which are also hard to ignore–the surroundings here remind me most of the Midwest. So early summer is Lilac Time here, and I’ve been wisting after lilacs, yearning for some of our own.
The morning of the fourth, we ventured forth to nurseries. Closed, alas. We finally went to Home Debit, which was open and had lots of lilacs for sale. The problem was that they were labeled “various”. I had a plan; I wanted a lavender lilac, a pink one, and a white one. After examining all the lilacs in search of some label related to color of blossom, I finally sent OmegaDad off on a quest for a helpful sales associate.
The helpful sales associate quoth: “Anything that says ‘syringa’ is going to be purple.”
The helpful sales associate was full of shit and we knew it. For evidence, I give you a Google image search for syringa. Note all the different colors. We debouched to Lowe’s.
Lowe’s didn’t have any lilacs at all. Pout.
So we went off to Freddy Myers, not expecting anything at all.
Lo and behold, we found our pink, purple, and white lilacs. All, by the way, labeled as “syringa“, which is not surprising, given that syringa is the Latin name for…lilac. (I am still rolling my eyes at the clueless sales associate at Home Debit.)
Then OmegaDad and I spent a while working on the chicken ark. A chicken ark is a portable coop for outdoors. More on the ark in a later post.
Then OmegaDad and the dotter headed off on a search for fireworks, and we did some observational research on less-than-noisy fireworks for next year’s celebration. Why get quiet fireworks? The neighborhood is full of dogs, including our own dawg, who I discovered, when I returned inside after our relatively quiet fireworks in the backyard, cowering under my desk, as far back as he could go.
On Saturday, OmegaDad and I spent quite a while with his newly constructed soil sifter, him digging dirt where the garden is going to go and sifting it, and me ferrying the wheelbarrow full of rocks over to the veggie garden pathway. Over and over again. And picking up rocky detritus. And exposing my skin.
Did you know Off wears off fairly quickly?
I do now.
I spent most of today doing laundry and scratching. Hands? Check. Feet? Check. Arms? Check. Neck? Check. Scalp? Check. Even one quick bite in a previously undiscovered hole by the pockets of my sweats which some swift, incredibly fit mosquito found was not covered with Off. There were enough bites and enough of a reaction that I spent half the day in a haze of light fever and misery.
OmegaDad claims it’s because I’m sweet. Har. Very flattering. I’d rather not be sweet; frankly, at this point, I’d like to be poisonous as a virper to mosquitoes, and watch them fall, twitching in insect misery, at the slightest penetration of my skin by a proboscis.
