Walks on the Beach

One June not too long ago, my mom, sister and I rented a house at York Beach, Maine for a week. We’ve been to York Beach countless times before, first at a tent in a nearby campground for a week at a time, year after year when I was a kid. As adults, we all stayed for a few days in a hotel across from the street from the beach. But this was the first time we had an entire house for our comfort.

The rental house was three stories tall. From the top floor, which featured a pool table and futons, we could see over the tops of the neighboring houses and see the ocean. There was a footpath from the neighborhood to the rocky end of the beach, which was great for morning and evening strolls with the dogs.

I was anxious to see how my dogs would react to the beach. They came to live with me when I lived in Tennessee, and the few times we walked along the Cumberland River, the two dogs had different reactions to the water. Moose tried to charge down the boat ramp and explore the river, while Winston had no interest in it at all. The ocean was going to be a whole new adventure.

In York during the summer season, dogs were allowed on the beach in the early morning. Accompanied by various combinations of one, two, or all three nieces, depending on the day, I would take the dogs to the beach. Other dogs were running off leash, chasing discs and balls, chasing the waves, and swimming. In keeping with my Hollywood-inspired notion of dogs and beaches, these other dogs (and their humans) looked like they were having fun.

In spite of my efforts to teach them, my dogs don’t seem to know how to play. Although Moose is a champion of consuming any and all fabric or plastic toys (in their entirety), neither dog has grasped the concept of fetching, catching, or returning an item, so I didn’t bother to bring toys to the beach. It was us and the leashes and the great oceanic outdoors. Because I wasn’t sure how they’d react during their first time at the ocean, I kept them on the leashes. We walked near the rocks and over the rocks and down towards the water. Or more accurately, I dragged them to the water. They stepped in the shallowest skim of water and were not impressed. They tried to drag me away from it.

Moose and Winston not really enjoying the beach.

One morning later in the week, I let them off the leashes when we were on the beach, and they ran. Not like I thought they would, though. They did not frolic happily on the beach. They did not explore the water. The second the leashes were detached, they turned and sprinted at top speed away from the water, across the sand, and up the stairs to the sidewalk, with my nieces and me chasing after them. These dogs had spoken, and they said they wanted no part of this beach business. Luckily, some people who were just arriving at the beach stopped my fleeing canines on the sidewalk at the top of the staircase.

Afterwards, every time we approached the little wooden footbridge on the path to the beach, Moose would make himself immobile by tensing up all four of his legs and bracing himself. It’s one of his favorite tactics at home. He whips himself into a frenzy of excitement upon seeing his leash, then after about twenty feet of walking, suddenly decides he doesn’t want to go walking after all. I have never determined what in our neighborhood (if anything) has him periodically boycotting our walk, but on our Maine vacation it seemed pretty clear it was dread of the beach.

Weird Wednesday

Short work weeks, like this Labor Day week, often feel screwy. There’s the confusing Tuesday that feels like Monday thing. The need to get five days worth of work done in four and the sudden appearance of Friday is met, not with joy, but with the panic of not having moved enough work off one’s workstation and onto someone else’s.

Then there are the added surprises, big and small -- like spending the long weekend not doing housework or laundry and realizing on Tuesday-Monday that you have no clean underwear that fits. Sadly, there is a drawer half full of undies that would still fit if you hadn’t spent the past 10.5 months not working out due to first healing a fractured leg, then babying it with its lingering nerve damage / numbness/ limited ankle mobility. The slower pace, somewhat hindered mobility, and newfound hobby of eating everything in sight have facilitated the recent acquisition of close to 15 pounds of fresh weight, quite possible some of the same flab newly shed by friends with more dietary discipline and a faster walking speed. 

On Wednesday of this week, as I was saying my morning goodbyes to the dogs (different than my lunchtime goodbyes) and taking my last sweeping glance at the place before leaving for work, I noticed a few signs of major laziness that needed remedying. There was a bag of trash set against the kitchen wall, waiting to be transported downstairs and eventually to the trash drop off place. The coffee table was cluttered with papers. Ditto for one of the kitchen counters. The couch pillows were heaped in the casual rearrangement preferred by the dogs. The table in the living room that sits against the wall was buried -- yes BURIED -- in plastic shopping bags. Two weeks earlier, I had decided to fuse layers of plastic to make fabric to construct a garment for a recycled fashion show in the Riverfest festival this weekend. First, I solicited bags from my coworkers, and boy did they respond. I spent several nights fusing three layers of plastic in a single sheet, many times over. Then one night drawing and cutting skirt pattern shapes and another fusing seams to connect six pattern pieces into a skirt. The rest of the raw material inventory (aka plastic shopping bags) sits on the table, sorted by size and color, atop several early fused layers of six sheets that are too thick and crunchy to use for clothing.

I never have company, there’s basically no chance in hell a man is going to show up to pick me up for a date, and after four months of the house being listed on the market with few people looking at it, it’s really hard to maintain the optimism and energy to make sure the place is ready for viewings every day. Like, practically impossible. There are days when I look back at the place and what I see as disarray and think, “Well, nobody’s been looking at it, I’m not going to be late for work just so I can take the trash to the basement / put away that sweater / pick up that dog hair,  etc.”

On Wednesday, I calculated the number of house viewings in the past four months (not that many), turned and waltzed out the door without dealing with any of the clutter. Yes, it was an actual waltz step in my mind, as I glided past multiple doggy poop bags (okay, a giant pile of them) tossed near the porch after returning from multiple walks with the fur babies that involve me transporting their poop in little black bags around the neighborhood. I traversed the brick walkway with the weeds growing between the bricks at a shocking rate. I surveyed the shaggy part of the lawn, uncut over the long weekend because I spent two hours trimming the hedges and low hanging tree branches so I could stop crouching under them with the mower and then was too hot, sweaty, hungry and tired to push the mower for the 45 minutes needed to tidy the lawn. Besides, only the half of the lawn with the fast growing scraggly grass needed a cut, the front section is some different kind of grass that doesn’t seem to actually grow. Instead of suffering heat exhaustion with additional yard effort, I had hit the shower and settled in for a full day Dr Who marathon on BBC America. And then it rained on and off over the next three days. Oops. Grass be growing now.

In any event, once at work on Wednesday, my 9:30 meeting started an hour late then ran twice as long as it was scheduled (typical, when they happen at all). It took a crazy turn when my coworker and I found ourselves suddenly reviewing a list of types of cattle as part of the work. Did you know there are over 800 breeds of cattle recognized worldwide? And that there are racing and fighting breeds? Yeah, me neither. RX3 might be my new favorite cattle breed name -- it sounds sleek, like a race car. And I'm sorry, but Jamaica Black, Jamaica Hope and Jamaica Red sound like types of pot.

When I returned to my desk and my cell phone, there were two messages from the real estate central showing center seeking approval to show the house from 1:00 to 2:00. My realtor and I had requested a one hour notice so that I could (theoretically -- if possible) get home and take the dogs out of the house. The scheduling folks had been waiting 1.5 hours for my response, and the showing time requested was now a mere 20 minutes from my hearing the message. I was just about to head to lunch at home anyway, but talk about panic. I asked for a 15 minute delay and sped across town. I grabbed the trash bag from the kitchen, loaded it with the poop bags from the porch and brought it down to the car. I neatened the stack of magazines and mail on the coffee table and kitchen counter and remade the bed destroyed daily by Winston and his luxuriating under the covers, opened the blinds, leashed up the dogs and fled the premises five minutes before the realtor and his client were due to arrive.

After the trash drop, which took approximately 12 minutes, I needed to figure out what to do for the next hour. Food seemed appropriate as I was hungry and now separated from my sparsely furnished pantry, so I went through the drive through at Backyard Burger for a veggie patty for myself and meat for the dogs. The heavy traffic prevented taking a left out of the place to head to Dunbar Cave Park near the house, so after a few curse word filled minutes, it was a redirect with a couple of rights and finally a left into Rotary Park (a County park) to eat and walk. The walk was quick -- I was wrangling two dogs in a new place, so they were all over trying to get all their sniffs and squirts in. There are no trash barrels there (Who knew? Not me!), so I was juggling the burger trash, cell phone, and keys, and trying to not be tripped up by the dogs. We lasted about five minutes.

Still with time to kill, we headed to Dunbar Cave State Park (which has trash barrels AND dog poop pickup bags!). I parked next to a dark green car with a lady talking on a cell phone,  got the dogs out and started walking. We didn’t get very far when I heard the woman yelling. She and I had the only cars in that part of the lot and were the only people around, so I figured she was yelling to me. 

As I got closer, the yelling lady explained she had a flat tire and was on her way to a job interview “right up the street.” I asked the address, as it’s my neighborhood and might know where it was.  She just kept reading from a tattered scrap of paper “Up the street. Past two churches and some apartments.” Ummm, ok. She acted like she assumed I would give her a ride and there was no reason to not help her, so I got the dogs back into the car. As I walked around to the driver’s side of my car, I made sure to check her tires. (Hey, I watch a lot of Lifetime Movies these days in my new lazy, weight building routine and I know that attractive ladies can also be psychotic murderers.)  Flat tire, indeed -- it looked like someone had sliced open the side wall.

In order to take in a human passenger I had to move the stuff into the back seat with the dogs that usually dwells on the passenger seat -- my purse, agenda book, sweater needed to prevent hypothermia in my cubicle, two CD cases that don’t fit into the car's storage thingy, plus the new bag of trash from lunch at the park with no trash barrels. I assessed my passenger as I buried my purse under all the other stuff on the floor in the back seat. She was dressed neatly in brown pants and an earth-toned print blouse (that hopefully camouflague dog hair), her blond hair was in a thick, loose braid down her back, and she carried a medium-sized,  buttery soft leather purse that was maybe a designer bag from TJ Maxx or a decent knockoff. She was skinnier that I was in my good old size four days of one short year ago. I calculated her to be a size two, and figured my new 15 pounds of heft would come in handy and I could take her if she turned out to be some psycho.

She kept repeating the directions “Up the street. Past two churches and some apartments.” I thought I knew the business park -- I drive by it all the time, and never knew exactly what was inside it. We found the entrance, and finally the building. I wished her good luck with her interview and told her I hoped she didn’t have too much trouble getting a ride back to her car and dealing with the flat tire. Then, the dogs and I returned home at the end of our one hour exile. I got them inside, and turned around and went back down my weed covered brick walkway, along the shaggy lawn and raced back to work for my afternoon meeting. But hey, at least my hedges and low hanging tree branches are trimmed. I hope the potential real estate buyer noticed that part and not the rest of it.

Tick, Tick, Tick

The mild (read: nonexistent) winter of 2012 has resulted in warnings about a prolific season for insects and critters  from people who know about and monitor such things. It never got cold enough to kill off, well, anything. Heck, it was the first winter in quite possibly my entire life when I didn't even pull on a pair of gloves. The absence of a solid winter freeze meant a spring of wretched  allergies for everyone, and even though it's only April, the ticks and mosquitoes are already out in full force.  I've been sneezing, personally responsible for a spike in tissue sales, and scratching at bug bites like a monkey for what feels like forever but is probably closer to a month. Good times.

While generally annoyed by any biting creature that leaves behind an itchy reminder of its bloodsucking infiltration of my person, I've been thoroughly skeeved out about ticks since back in the last century. In the mid-1990s I met Meg just after she'd contracted Lyme Disease from a tick bite while gardening in her yard on Cape Cod. She was pregnant at the time and endured partial facial paralysis for several months from Bell's Palsy, which lasted until she delivered the baby. As a kid who never much cared for bugs, dirt or sweating, I reached adulthood backed by years of solid experience of summers invested in hiding indoors reading books to avoid insects and life in general. This methodology proved highly effective until the summer of 2008 when the stray cat I coaxed into my house and life converted my bug-free sanctuary into a flea-ridden hellhole. Daily routines expanded to include obsessive vacuuming coupled with frequent use of a lint roller and the wearing of Deep Woods insect repellant on the feet and ankles while indoors. Two failed home bug bombs led to the contracting of the services of a professional exterminator, a relationship that has endured for four years. During the period of flea infestation I became highly adept at sensing abnormalities (such as a lone flea) upon my flesh and could run the lint roller over all surfaces to collect fleas and their larvae with the speed of a Marvel Comics superhero.

Fortunately (and probably in large part due to my extensive avoidance techniques), I enjoyed minimal personal contact with ticks. There was the two-week archeological dig  at Land Between the Lakes back in October 2003 or so, when I sprayed liberally with Deep Woods eau de DEET, kept pant legs and shirt tucked in and still found a tick on my stomach one night after returning home. One tick over a two-week period spent daily in the woods felt like success. After performing at City of Clarksville's 2010 Riverfest along the Cumberland River, I felt an itch, and upon removing my belly dance costume, dealt with the glorious task of removing a tick that was busily burrowing into my bosom.  

The spring of 2012, however, is proving to be a record breaker.

In the space of one week in late April, I had already removed a tick from each dog, both of which seemed to be already expired and interpreted by me to mean the flea and tick solution is working. Then, sensing something unusual and tickly on my own skin, examined the situation and found a tiny, orangish dot with little crawly legs traversing the expanse of milky skin between my lady pillows. The next night, again sensing something amiss, I discovered a larger, darker reddish brown demon burrowing into my inner thigh, thus triggering a new, near-permanent state of high alert. I can now detect an eyelash or a dust mote on my skin the instant it lands, which, with my new hyper-acute sense of awareness carry the weight of a log or a boulder.

And that brings us to today, a day spent schlepping material possessions from the confines of the basement and inner sanctum of my home out to the front lawn -- and in the case of much of it, back from whence it came -- in the home retail ritual known as a Yard Sale. The rigors of dragging an ottoman, various chairs, boxes of  books, coffee mugs and other assorted housewares out to the front yard to be arranged on tables previously trotted up the driveway to the yard, and then unwinding the whole operation seven hours later, left me feeling thoroughly spent and in need of a lovely nap. It's cheaper and more convenient than going to a gym, but by the end of it, the leg that was broken six months ago was throbbing and aching (except for the parts that are still numb), and the leg that is doing the bulk of the work of transporting me around was even more fatigued than usual. My lower back hurt and my shoulders and neck were screaming with exertion and tension. The couch beckoned for a nap or to watch a movie (or a combination of the two).  We settled in -- Moose nestled into the pillows by my shoulder, and Winston down by my feet.

As I usually do when they are laying against me (or completely on me), I was petting my fur babies.  I felt a little bump on Moose's belly which turned out to be a tick. I disrupted our scene of domestic tranquility to fetch the now specially designated tick removing tweezers and pull the thing off. Like the one on him the other day, this one seemed less than alive.

Exhausted from moving heavy stuff in 80+ degree heat while now simultaneously harboring a refreshed state of tick high alert, I thought I felt something on my own stomach. Bingo! It was a tick, but unlike the one just removed from Moose, mine was still scuttling around and attempting to become one with my flesh. The tweezers came back out and so did the tick, which was entrapped on a piece of tape like his compatriot from Moose. By now, the idea of napping was nothing more than one of those flimsy morning dreams that evaporate with the bleat of the alarm clock. When the dogs rotated positions, it was Winston's turn for petting and tick inspection, which revealed one in the crease where his leg joins his body.  A banner day -- everybody gets a tick.

The calm of an evening featuring two hours of  Big Bang Theory episodes in syndication and a Lifetime network movie starring Lindsey Lohan, fueled by a supremely satisfying supper of double portobello veggie burgers with Provolone cheese and lettuce on an everything bagel accompanied by a Sam Adams Boston Lager, was interrupted by intrusive thoughts of ticks. The tranquility destroyers were two thoughts recurring to the point of obsession -- What will happen when I find a tick in a place I can't reach to remove it? And what if there is already a tick lodged in such a location and I just haven't found it yet? As I was shoving these ideas aside for the umpteenth time, I was snapped to attention by a poking feeling beyond my side and more around towards my back. The first assumption was the mandatory care tag in my new summer camisole, but contortions and yoga twists revealed it to be another freeking tick -- the second such discovery in an hour or two.

It's feeling out of control. Is it safe to use heavy duty repellant all over, every day like body lotion? Is there a body lotion with DEET that desn't smell like insect repellant and make my nose become stuffy? Does canine Frontline work on people? I sense a new research project in my immediate future, but it's probably just another tick. I'll tackle those new questions right after trying to memorize the symptoms of tick-borne illnesses like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme disease. With four ticks removed from myself in one week's time, I am quickly losing faith in my odds. It's making my skin crawl.