In Which Nature Repeatedly Kicks My Trash

photo by me

The weather has been especially nice the last few days and while everyone else's yards are blooming with flowers, I have a few pots of dirt.  But I do have shrubbery.  So in an effort to imitate the joy of fresh-cut flowers in our home, I butchered the back side of one of our front yard shrubs and arranged pretty little sprigs of greenery in some of my favorite milk glass. 

And then I had the most brilliant idea ever: cut twiggy limbs from our singular backyard tree and bring them inside to live in my rusty watering can.  Kyle took one look at my rusty watering can full of twiggy limbs and asked "Why did you bring weeds inside?"  They did look kind of weedy, but I left them anyway.  You know, the pride thing. 

A few days later I noticed that the twiggy limbs had sprouted cotton all over the house and was likely the source of our raging allergies.  So much for twiggy limbs...

But then we took a drive.  And along this drive there were the most beautiful orange wildflowers just sprouting up everywhere along the road.  So I made Kyle pull over and I picked beautiful orange wildflowers to my heart's content.  And believe me, I was perfectly content. 

Until I put the flowers in the back seat only to see them explode in hoards of tiny ants.  No bunch of beautiful orange wildflowers is worth the horror of being covered in insects of any kind.  So I left my beautiful bunch lying along the side of the road, a sad display of what might have been.

Later on our drive I discovered a random ant making its way down my arm and carefully flicked it off in the car. 

Okay that didn't happen. 

I screamed.  Loudly.  While flailing my arms every which way and scaring the life out of Kyle, the driver.  I know, I know it is just an ant, but really it's like moths, you know how if there's one you just know there are others lurking in the dark waiting to eat your eyelashes?  But don't you think so?

Which reminds me, there was one year in Colorado when the moths were so bad that if you stopped your car near a bush and your windows were down, the moths would fly out of their bushy hiding spaces en masse and into every car crevice to attack your face, most likely to chew off your eyelashes.  This totally happened to me.  I kid you not.

And you wonder why I'm terrified of moths?

They are absolutely the spawn of Satan.  Second only to spiders.  And hoardes of tiny ants inside my car.