Word of the Day: “Chigger (chig’ er) the tiny, red larva of a family (Trombiculidae) of mites, whose bite causes severe itching.”
“The White House on Willow Brook Road”–sounds like the title of a children’s book, doesn’t it? When my family moved to the old white house on Willow Brook Road, it proved to be the best place ever to grow up. Looking back, I realize that it probably wasn’t quite as glamorous as I thought at the time. We didn’t have a furnace; the house was heated in the winter by open gas heaters with no outside venting. I suspect that sort of heat wouldn’t be allowed today. Even as a kid, I learned how to strike a match carefully and light the heaters. In fact, I still have a slight scar on my right leg as a reminder of a close encounter with one of those hot devices. As a safety measure, the heaters in the bedrooms would be turned off at night, but the one in the bathroom was left on. I can still remember running into the bathroom on cold mornings and feeling the wonderful heat from that glowing heater!
Summers weren’t much better! We had no air conditioning in the hot, sticky Dallas heat, but we had a huge attic fan. Sleeping with that fan running was somewhat like lying under a jet engine during take off. It practically sucked the sheets off of the bed, but it certainly provided air movement. One wonderful summer, we got one small window unit air conditioner. My Dad installed it in the room we called the family room. I think in the original design of the house it was the dining room, but we had no dining room furniture so it became the family room. Ah, delicious coolness! We kept the doors to the rest of the house shut and watched television in the wonderful cool air. At night the air conditioner was turned off, and the mighty attic fan was turned on. I wonder why it never occurred to us to sleep on the floor in the family room?
Television in the family room was our main source of at-home entertainment. Saturday morning were replete with Sky King, Rama of the Jungle, Rin Tin Tin, Mighty Mouse, and who recalls what else. Our old farm-house was also a repository for bugs of all sorts. Now, I hate bugs, and I think it stems from my lying on the floor in that family room watching television when a scorpion goes strolling past, right next to my foot. Of all possible bugs, scorpions were the worst! Worse than wasps, bees, mosquitos, and even the nuisance chiggers. I was petrified of the scorpions, although I was never unfortunate enough to actually get stung by that frightening tail.
On one particularly horrifying night, I was reading in bed, and all of a sudden I saw a scorpion walking across the top of my book. I let out a blood-curdling shriek and hurled the book across the room. Loud footsteps down the hallway quickly brought my Mother, Father, and little sister, all of whom were probably expecting to see an intruder accosting me or at the very least Bigfoot! The positively scary part was that we never found the nocturnal little creature. The thought that it had climbed up on my bed and onto my book without my seeing it was what really upset me the most. For a long time, I never went to bed without doing a complete check of the covers, pulling back the sheets and looking under the bed. To this day, I never let my arm or leg hang out over the side of the bed. You just can’t be too careful; they might have tracked me down after all these years.
I think my Dad contributed to my hatred of scorpions with his tales of the scorpions in North Africa. A Captain in World War II, he served in the North African campaign, the invasion of Italy, and the horrific battle of Anzio. Although he seldom talked about his war-time experiences, he would tell us frightening stories of the scorpions in Africa, six inches long and pasty white. He said the soldiers never put their boots on in the morning without carefully dumping them out just in case they had an unwelcome visitor in them. I suspect that I would have found the stories of the actual battles less upsetting than those sneaky scorpions! When the war ended, returning soldiers were expected to tough it out and get back into civilian life. There was no such diagnosis as PTSD in those days, but the nightmares my Dad suffered from up until the time of his death may have been the aftermath of the awful realities of that war. We three, my Mother, my sister, and I, all quickly learned that when my Dad was sleeping and we needed to wake him up, we gave a quick shake or poke and then ducked. He always came up with fists flying and arms flailing
Although scorpions warranted my greatest fear, chiggers probably caused me much more misery. For those of you not familiar with these little creatures, they are some sort of little red mite, almost microscopic, that burrows under the skin, causing hundreds of red welts and itching like crazy. Not much helped to shorten their obnoxious little life span beneath the skin. People tried calamine lotion, mercurochrome, and even clear fingernail polish, apparently on the theory that the polish would suffocate the little monsters. Prevention was somewhat found in dusting your feet, ankles, and groin area with sulfur powder. My Mother had little cloth pouches of sulfur which we applied generously, turning our socks and clothes a bright yellow color. I don’t know if she made them or bought them ready-made. It does make you wonder if the prevention might have been more dangerous to our health than the creatures themselves!
The other prevention was in having a lawn of St.Augustine grass, that lovely viney grass found so often in Texas and the South. St. Augustine turns brown in the winter and a deep green in the summers. For some reason, chiggers don’t like it, and neither do the awful goatshead stickers that I managed to step on so many times! Unfortunately, our lawn in that old rental house did not have the cool, green St. Augustine. We had a bit of Bermuda grass augmented by a wide variety of weeds and stickers, just waiting to pounce upon the unspecting bare foot. And the chiggers loved it!
©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers
Join me next Friday for “More Tales from the White House!”
