Little Visitors

In our first weeks here, I said something that has turned out to be more prophetic than I imagined. We were contemplating the "bee ivy" that has overtaken the back half of our yard.

Grandpa's son, who was technically one of the sellers but who never lived in the house, told us during the final walkthrough that it was Boston Ivy and that it was an offshoot from a 250-year-old plant at some farm in the next county. He also said it would have "really nice purple berries in the fall." Which I was glad for, because I might have torn the whole thing out if he hadn't told me that.

It's badly overgrown and during the summer it is completely covered with bees, yellow jackets, hornets, and wasps. I don't know what the swarms like about it, but you have to walk right through this vibrating mass to get to and from our car. It is also right next to the compost pile and surrounds one of our planting beds.

For now, I think we're keeping it, but pruning it back significantly (once all the bees go away for the winter). It is after all the Ivy League ivy, and actually I saw it on a brick building in a town nearby and it looked really cool.

But, in July, we didn't know what we were going to do, we had just gotten here from the BIG City, and I said: "Maybe we just have to get used to more bugs here in the country. They're probably a normal part of life, like garbage and rats in the city."

And, hoo-boy, ain't that true! In addition to the constant drone of the bee ivy, we have regular visitors to the butterfly bush: monarchs and other butterflies, those big fuzzy bees, and once the tiniest hummingbird I ever saw (not really a bug, I know). Crickets jump away from every where you walk, prune, weedwhack, or mow. A few spiders have freaked me out, and of course the compost pile is crawling with the creepies. That's just the garden, it's inside the house that I'm having a hard time getting used to.

Insect visitors have included:
- Big old buzzing flies, who seem impervious to the fly strips,
- Little web-spinning spiders in all the floor corners,
- A big old scary millipede, who ran so fast I couldn't squash him,
- A big old black wasp, who buzzed around the library for a few days,
- A few city-type small roaches in the kitchen,
- Daddy-long-legs slowly crawling across the ceiling, and
- Crickets crickets everywhere, from small to the size of my thumb, and they never seem to know how they got here or how to get out.
Mercifully, there have been no ants. I've even gotten a little buggy, thinking I see out of the corner of my eye something black crawling across the floor, then turning my head to find nothing at all.

I'm not properly scared of bugs, but I don't like them. Maybe after more than three months of country life I'll get used to all the jumping, chirping, web-spinning, crawling creatures of the field, but for now I'm still reacting like a city girl.