August 17: The smell of August

There's no smell like an August evening. It's predominantly the smell of sweet hay from the sun-burned grass. It's got notes of dust and insects and the things that eat insects. It smells like finely aged sunlight, really.

The summer I was seven, we moved here from the other side of an ocean. Alongside the bewilderment of heat and shale stones and pine needles, the wonder of scorpions and toads and unsupervised bike riding, the smell of deep summer is the thing I remember most.

August 18: The larval menace

Enough of pretty stars and flowers and fascinating bugs for a moment. Let's talk about ticks. Not the brown dog ticks and the deer ticks you see in the pet care ads. Those pests are disgusting, physically uncomfortable, can carry diseases, and can even make a mammal sick by their sheer number if it comes down to that. But they're pretty easy to find and dispose of, if you're alert.

There's a much more insidious menace out there. It's almost invisible, and it comes not singly but by the dozens and hundreds. It can penetrate clothing, and it can't be removed by hand. If it's not discovered, it may infest its host for weeks. If it is discovered and quickly removed, it still leaves a maddeningly itchy blister tens of times its own size.

I'm talking about the SEED TICK. These are the hideous larvae in the tick life cycle. (Can you tell that my tolerance for all creatures doing what comes naturally is strained by this specimen?) Country-dwellers know them. People who walk through tall grass and through the woods, people who are outdoors in the lushness of summer. We know that if you brush against some grass, then later feel something crawling up your leg, that's a tick. Locate him, throw him away, that's it. But if you sit on the ground somewhere, then later have a vague sense that your skin is crawling, just... maybe... maybe not... are you imagining it? You can investigate, but if you don't have good vision, you probably won't see anything.

If you do have excellent vision, pale skin, and a good light source, you may find them: tiny, light-brown specks, one quarter the size of a poppy seed, moving like an impossibly distant army across your skin. Don't try to brush them off with your hands. If your skin is slightly damp from sweat, or you've used sunscreen recently, it won't work; or you'll just end up with seed ticks on your hands and soon your arms.

They need to be flushed off with water, lifted off with masking tape, or, if they've attached, which they do quite quickly, they need to be scraped away with fingernails or a blade or a good fine scrubber. Heaven help you if you're not near water, and they're all over your clothes. Wearing your socks tucked over your pants legs is good advice for dealing with adult ticks, but seed ticks can, and will, crawl right between the fibers of your socks and all over your feet and ankles and up your legs. You might as well just discard the socks in an outdoor waste receptacle as soon as you can, because you'll never be sure you've washed the seed ticks out.

This public service message is brought to you by my going for a hike without wearing insect repellent. I've never needed it at that location before, but still. I know so much better.