Anyone driving past my garden this morning might have thought I had lost my mind. What kind of person jerks up and down and flings her arms around and waves her hat like a maniac in the middle of the blackberry patch?
"A person being bothered by a deerfly" would be the correct answer. Now before you tsk at me for allowing a puny little fly to wreck my composure, let me tell you: this was no puny little fly. It looked like the Fly that Ate Toledo--and come to think of it, it had that smug Carty Finkbeiner look about the eyes.
Deer and cows and horses have tails to help them swat these pesky biting flies, but I have to rely on my hands and whatever they happen to be holding at the time. I'm not about to swat flies with freshly picked blackberries so I used my hat, which discourages the flies only temporarily. At one point I was using a pen-knife to cut swiss chard when a fly attacked. Note to self: next time, close the knife first.
The low point of my morning, though, arrived when I was up to my elbows in okra and a fly began drilling right into the middle of my back. I pulled off my hat and started swatting--and sent my glasses flying across the garden.
I quickly learned that my glasses blend in pretty well with weeds, mulch, and overgrown okra. I might have had an easier time finding them if I'd had my glasses on, but if I'd had my glasses on, I wouldn't have needed to search for them.
I came in from the garden with three big painful welts on my back and a small cut on my hand. And my glasses! I don't know how long I was out there searching for them, but I finally saw a glint at the base of an okra plant. Thank God for small blessings.
I left the flies outside. As far as I'm concerned, they can go bite themselves.
Deer fly buzzing round my face,
please go find another place,
another person to distract.
Please stop landing on my back!
Don't bite my arms, my legs, my neck,
avoid my face--and what the heck
would made you want to bite my ear?
Annoying pest, get out of here!
Fly, you make me lose my grace-
fulness and poise and any trace
of sanity--I dance and twitch
and swat. Deer fly, you make me itch!
What makes my flesh so tasty, fly?
Why must you bite me? Why oh why
must you disrupt my mental health?
Deer fly, please go bite yourself.
Now it's your turn: write verse of any form about what's really bugging you.
1 comment:
In mid tournament Clyde Higginbottom, up a set and with a break in hand,
cycled back for a high ball, his racket in approved position somewhere behind his neck. Floating lobs, as those familiar with the sport will know, are lazy-seeming blighters when viewed from the ground. They suggest with their body language that if there’s anything else you think you might want to do first, some occupation from a long list, go ahead, we’ll be about this business of falling for quite some time. Clyde’s eye settled on a butterfly that was passing, nature’s equivalent of the girl in a saucy skirt who walks by, says “Hi,” means nothing by it. more to the tale, but the moral is easy to grasp: even objects not in a mirror can be closer than they appear.
D.
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