Bugged

[Tuesday evening]
I have never before wanted so desperately to tear off all of my clothes as I did today. Moxie and I had hiked through a marsh on a trail, then played fetch on a nearby grassy road. Minutes after we got back in the car, I saw a tick crawling up the front of my sweatshirt. I threw the bug out the window. Then I looked down and saw three on my jeans. I pulled off at a gas station and must have pulled a dozen off Moxie in a few short minutes. Then I went into the ladies’ room and found so many more… on my legs, my waist, clinging to the inside of my pant leg, even. Back in the car not five miles later, I peeked down to my previously bugless ankle and saw a lone climber. So I stopped at a carwash and vacuumed the rug, then administered Moxie’s monthly systemic pesticide a day early. All day I continued to find them, mostly on Moxie. All told, I’m sure I handled more than 30 ticks today.

So I’m questioning this whole nature-loving thing. The fashion’s great. But the spidery blood-sucking bugs? Oy vey. Far gone are the Egyptian cotton sheets and Turkish masseuse I encountered when traveling in my old life. Now I sit at a campsite in Wisconsin in a stinky soup of chemical mosquito repellents. I even dabbed a little deet on the insides of Moxie’s reddening ears in an effort to derail the plump biters swarming around them. Am I really up to all this nature?