As you may have deduced from the foreshadowing, I did have to leave Shreveport during my childhood, and I was not a happy camper. We bought a nice house in Doyline for a ridiculously low price (location, location, location). I was forced to change schools, and convert my best friends into pen pals. The town of Doyline was picturesque enough, and there were two schools (K-5, and 6-12), but our house was two miles from those schools. Our house was also two miles from the nearest store. There was no park. The library was a single room building among the antique store fronts on the one road in town. It was only open one day a week for a few hours.
I scanned the houses and trailers for any child my age. I found none. As to add insult to injury, the really cool log-cabin house was surrounded by a desert of turf grass.
Overgrown turf grass.
(The trees were somebody else's property. Of course, I know now that the woods in Shreveport were somebody else's property, too, but back then, I had never before considered that somebody owned - or could own - the woods.)
The first day my family stayed in that house, my whole family was plagued with bug bites. My whole family...except for me. At first, my parents were convinced that they had been swarmed by mosquitoes. These country mosquitoes, however, went for skin covered by snug cloth and elastic bands. After two or three days, they were still miserable, as the bumps on their skin were still itchy, red, and swollen. Worse yet, good ole' calamine lotion gave them no comfort.
I couldn't help but think in was karmic: The people who forced me to leave civilization were now driven mad with some kind of skin parasites they encountered at their country paradise. But meanness aside, I held the biggest clue to the problem...I did not have any bites (or whatever they were).
So let's use deductive reasoning: The itching bumps appeared on Tuesday on three people, but not the fourth. On Tuesday, all four family members crossed the front yard, brought in boxes, and dwelled in the house. Three people ventured out among the tall grasses to explore their new backyard. The fourth walked the road following the woods to find a property owner. If the fourth person acted as a control, then the variable of the experiment is the overgrown grass - the one place the fourth person did not go.
Serves them right. Stupid grass.
But seriously, whatever they encountered were obviously not mosquitoes. They were...as we were about to learn from the locals...chiggers.
Chiggers are little bitty red mites that have a parasitic stage of their life cycle. You may actually be able to see the adults (harvest mites) if you sense movement well and look really hard. The larvae walk so lightly that you don't feel them on you, but once they pierce your skin and inject you with a salivary secretion, you'll feel them alright! The secretion contains powerful, digestive enzymes that break down your skin cells so that the chiggers can ingest them.
To board a host, chiggers climb up plant stalks and wait for something or someone to brush by. They only hang around for about four days, then drop off to complete the rest of their life cycle as upstanding members of the environment. Sometimes the skin remains irritated for a few days after the parasite has gone, but the itching that results from having microscopic quantities of your skin liquified and sucked out is incredible. To alleviate it, people have come up with all kinds 'remedies.' Paint the bumps with nail polish, pour rubbing alcohol on them, bathe in oatmeal, bathe in bleach, coat your skin in oil - you name it - someone has probably tried it.
During my family's first days at the new house, I escaped a chigger infestation, but I have not always been so lucky. I have had my share of chigger bites. I have also tried many of the home remedies. I seem to remember a product called "Chig-a-rid" that I painted over the bumps. It definitely worked better than nail polish. Not too long ago, I took my chiggers to the dermatologist. I thought it was high time to get some professional advice and prescription-strength products. I was surprised to discover that the dermatologist's advice was to add one cup of bleach to a hot bath and soak. "You can tolerate it," she said, "They can't."
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2100.html
http://www.chigarid.com/
1 comment:
Okay, I know this is an old post, LOL. But I was just Googling to see when chiggers come out because I forget..I believe it is usually mid to late May or early June around where I live in Vernon Parish. We live in a wooded acre but no tall grass. Some bushes and trees but I keep vines cut down/back and the bushes are not close together for the most part. There are, however, HUGE amounts of leaf litter everywhere but right around the house where our yard/grass is, a bit less than a quarter of the acre we live on as ours. When we first moved here in 2006 and had this land cleared (it was solid overgrown woods), we didn't have a chigger problem and not for the next 6 or 7 years. Then one summer, something was eating me UP. I had forgotten about chiggers though we did get eaten by them when I was a child. Once I figured out it WAS chiggers, I couldn't figure out how I was encountering them because once I realized what the bites were from, I AVOIDED brushing up against the bushes at all costs. Sometimes it seemed that I hadn't even been off the porch hardly and STILL was being devoured. After much research, I found out the one here anyway were living in all that leaf litter, which I walked through usually even just going out to check the mail...I mean, I'd see a vine or something that needed pulling or clipping and just take care of it. EUREKA! Once I figured out WHERE the little devils were getting on me...obviously on my shoes and then climbing upwards, I started spraying the tops of my socks (I wear shorts all summer and Crocs with socks, LOL) with Deep Woods Off, the difference was amazing. I wasn't completely free of bites, but they were much, much fewer. So for the past several years, I just start that in the spring and continue it until fall. Again, I ALWAYS thought the chiggers got on folks because the folks brushed up against vegetation or walked through tall grass and such...none of that applies here. Anyway, just an interesting anecdote. LOL, I share that tip with everybody including the clerks in the stores when I buy the spray...nope, none of them are interested because they obviously don't live in a chigger haven.
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