I almost always played outside from the time I was old enough to understand where I could and couldn't go alone; I found very little fun inside the house unless Mother was cooking something good. Yes, it's fun to eat in a house when my mother was cooking. If she baked a cake, I licked not only the spoon, but the bowl also. If she baked a pie, she cooked the little scraps of pie dough she had cut off and gave them to me. Some folks have told me their mothers put sugar and cinnamon on the dough before cooking theirs, but I liked it just plain. But I digress.
In spring, summer, and fall, I always had chiggers becauses they live in the grass, and I did too. I don't remember having much trouble with mosquitoes then, in Iowa or Missouri either. Oh, but those chiggers found their blood on the most intimate parts of my body! Their favorite place, bar none, was my belly button. I had trouble getting to sleep because they made me itch so badly. I'd stick my finger in trying to scratch it, but that only seemed to make it worse!
I probably shouldn't tell you this, but at a certain age around two years old, and sometimes lasting a lot longer, children are pigs. For instance, they pick their noses no matter who is around, sometimes even putting the stuff they harvest on their finger so they can check it out. If it makes the grade, they might even see if it tastes good. Again, I digress, because not one chigger ever went up my nose. However, as a little pigs do, I got curious and sniffed my finger. What a terrible smell inside my belly button! Like any good little pig, I made it a regular thing to check my belly button every time the red bugs decided to torture me.
Now I am living with mosquitoes. I reached through the okra row trying to see if there were any pods yet (there were none), and was almost carried away by mosquitoes! Get this: The mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal. Spreading diseases like malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Zika, chikungunya, and lymphatic filariasis, the mosquito kills more people than any other creature in the world. How on earth have I lived so long?
Oh yes, and I have picked more ticks this year than usual. Ticks can spread disease.
Not all ticks can cause disease and not all bites will make you sick, but as these diseases become more common it's important to learn how to prevent a bite, how to remove a tick and what to do if you think you could have a tick-borne disease.
Lyme disease is the most common disease spread by ticks in New York but there are other serious diseases transmitted by ticks including babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, hard tick relapsing fever, and Powassan encephalitis.
I guess I'm just lucky.
