Relative Something

Before the horses came into view on my way to the barn, I heard an uncharacteristic whinny from one of the horses. As I came around the wall of the overhang, I found three of the horses coping fine, but Mia was flinching and stomping her feet and whipping her tail. She was obviously uncomfortable with the amount of harassment being dished out by the flies.

A day or two earlier, Cyndie had spotted big welts on Mia from her reaction to the bites. I returned to the house to interrupt Cyndie and her three lunch guests for a consultation. Since she hadn’t covered Mia with a fly sheet earlier, she decided to leave her friends and come with me to help Mia without delay.

The sheet is white, so at a glance from a distance, I couldn’t tell her apart from Mix. This morning, Mia was walking with an awkward timidity because the straps around her back legs bugged her. We agreed that the sheet could come off for the time being.

She still has on her extremely fashionable hand-me-down fly boots to protect her lower legs. A brisk wind would do wonders to reduce the abuse they suffer from flies, but we don’t have much say in making that happen.

I suffered an insect bite of my own yesterday. Found a tick firmly attached to my upper arm that I needed to enlist Cyndie’s help, again, to extract. We will be monitoring the site for evidence that demands professional analysis. In the meantime, I will seek to ensure I have all my critical affairs in order.

My dreary attempt at bleak humor aside, I have been bitten by so many ticks in my life and dodged major consequences that I’m fully expecting this to resolve similarly. You’d think I would take it more seriously, given Cyndie’s experience with Lyme Disease, but her situation involved an unknown source of infection and a lengthy period of confusing symptoms before being identified.

My distress would be much greater if I didn’t see the tick that bit me and know it hadn’t been on me for more than a few hours. Experiencing symptoms of illness with no known cause, like getting bitten by a tick that is almost microscopically small and never realizing it, scares me a lot more.

Both Cyndie and I chose long ago to accept the gamble of risking exposure to ticks in order to fully experience our outdoor activities at Wintervale.

This latest tick bite does have me missing the chickens a little more than usual today. They would have gobbled this critter up long before he had a chance to get me, I’m sure of it.

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