Thursday, August 14, 2008

On being tickled (and not in 'that' way)

You know how sometimes you're just sitting reading, or sleeping, or doing not much of anything and you feel something tickle your foot or arm? You swear it is something crawling on your skin. You look down, and of course - it's nothing.

Well....9 times out of 10 down here when this happens to me... it is bloody something! This afternoon it was a large fuzzy caterpiller. I instantly exclaimed "Uh!!!" and shook my foot violently, flinging said innocent insect into the trees. Sometimes it's an ant, sometimes some other thing that I don't even want to know the name of ... large, black, with wings and really really ugly.

Fortunately, although I find having insects crawling on me to be startling and mostly very unpleasant.... I'm not really paranoid of insects, so these daily occurrences of being tickled do not give me bad dreams or anything. What they do do, is remind me that it has been a very long time since I lived anywhere near nature at all. When I was a kid growing up on a farm in the prairies... running into caterpillers, ants, and any number of other tiny and ugly creatures was pretty normal.

It's nice to be visited by nature again... I'm liking it. Just keep the little bastards out of my bed, please!

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