Notes from my Knapsack 6-17-21

Notes from my Knapsack 6-17-21

Jeff Gill

The obscure joys of doing nothing

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Friends, if you read my last column about John Cherney and his memorial plaque at Denison, I am delighted to share that while he died in 1912 in China, he did leave behind a daughter as well as a widow, and they have connections back to Our Fayre Village!

When I have additional information I can share, I promise to continue this story. While it contains tragedy, sorrow does not define it. More to come . . .

The Manchurian plague of 1911 & 1912 was what got me thinking, and as we watch our vaccination rate climb past 50% and case rates drop below 50 per 100,000 and so on, I'm still thinking.

But sometimes, I just go out on the back patio and don't think. I just sit, and watch the clouds boil up, the birds fly over, and the cottonwood leaves flutter in the lightest of breezes. Call it killing time if you want; my own need for a break was after tugging a great deal of weedy stuff out of the cracks between the bricks, so that my back and fingers were sore and I just wanted to relax a bit. The clouds, the crows and buzzards, the ripples in the green were just means to an end, and that end was relaxation and restoration.

Until. I looked down at the arm of the Adirondack chair I was sitting in, a proper deep dark green, and saw a speck of red scurry along it. Huh, I thought vaguely. Nice contrast, tiny red against forest green plank. And then, focused on the insect as I was, my frame of reference brought down from cumulonimbus and treetop level and size, I see clearly there's not one red speck.

There's two. No, three. Wait, dozens. All over the arm rest, the seat, and . . . yep, one on me. I leapt up, brushing gently.

Previous experience reminds me that these are simple, harmless clover mites. They don't bite, don't spread disease, but when you smash them, they leave a red trace that's very hard to clean out of cloth or off of walls. And they are all over the patio, that being a lovely place for them this time of year, the lawn nearby for food and the cracks ideal for laying eggs for the next generation of clover mites.

I walked back towards the house, checking around onto my backside and down my legs; a distant observer would have assumed I was doing a strange version of upright yoga or something. My goal was simply to avoid bringing clover mites indoors and adding them to our internal ecosystem. What I didn't want to do was smash any.

This is the time of year when it's worth remembering that for most insects, most of the time, less is more. Don't swat, don't swing, don't panic. Especially don't panic. A cicada flies into your face? Don't freak out, especially if you're driving. A bee passes near? Don't flail at an inoffensive creature which doesn't want to bite you, anyhow. Even wasps and later on, yellow jackets are best dealt with by not dealing with them. Prevention, maybe, with open sweet drink containers and so on, but swatting them ends poorly for everyone.

Summer is a good time to figure out who else is sharing this ecosystem with us, and how we best live together. Smashing things often just makes a mess for you, in more ways than one.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he does smash mosquitos. It's all about discernment. Tell him how you live with what bugs you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.