Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

Every place has its problems, its annoyances. In urban areas there's often noise to deal with, or traffic, or maybe a neighbor's tree encroaching into your yard.

In the country we have flies. Where there are herd animals there will be flies.

The house we moved into in 1971 had white aluminum siding on it. From a distance the siding looked okay, I guess, but within a few feet the first thing people noticed was the black polka dots on the white paint. "What are those?" they'd ask.

"Fly specks."

"Oh. What are fly specks?"

"That'd be fly poop."

"Oh. Can't you wash them off?"

"Would you like to try?"

Fly specks covered our house, our patio furniture, our cars, and probably our pets, if we had looked hard enough. Removing fly specks is next to impossible, so after a while you just give up. Removing the flies was impossible, though Mom tried. She bought bags of wasp larvae (more bugs), which we kids "planted" in fresh cow manure all over the dairy. When they hatched, the theory went, the tiny black wasps would destroy the fly larvae, somehow, and without pesticides. Who knew that 1970s bumpkins could be ecofriendly? The only problem was that if it worked, nobody could tell.

When Chas and I were first dating he introduced me to his old roommate Evan, who asked where I was from. "Oh, Orland -- I know a dairy family in Orland," he said. "I went to a fly-be-que there once." Yes, well, eating outside after Easter is not advisable if you live on a dairy. But, as with hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes or network news, after a while you do get used to the clouds of flies. Some of us, like the father of my best friend Cheryl, become almost proud of our fly-endurance -- "I've eaten in worse flies," he claimed. I've filed that quote away among my favorites.

So many more bugs and pests to share with you! But they'll have to wait for another day, because I have flies to swat.