This Post May Bug You

 

 

Monday, May 18^{th .}Victoria Day in Canada. Note that it is NOT Queen’s actual birthday. I am not sure when that is. It is a holiday that supposedly celebrates our sovereign. And it is the weekend to open the cottage, or buy bedding plants or … stay inside lest you be eaten alive by little black flies.

I did not grow up with blackflies. Mosquitoes, yes, and deer flies and shad flies and deer flies (more later on these not dear devils), all of those. And my parents opened the cottage on what was then often called ‘The Queen’s Birthday’, so I had an intimate holiday meeting with some of those listed above. But I lived too far south to grow up with the little black miseries. And so, when I get bitten by one, I get a big red welt at each bite spot. A mosquito bite’s evidence does not last for more than a few minutes; I am acclimated to them, annoying as they are. My daughters, who did grow up with them, do not react this way. But I am really sensitive to the blackflies and they are, presently, thick.

I am not the only person to hate the pests. If you do a control/click on the link here Blackfly - NFB it should take you to a really wonderful short song about them. (If that doesn’t work, here is the link to the Wikipedia website The Blackfly Song - Wikipedia. Even if you know this short animation of the song, playing it is a pleasant few minutes.

Anyway, my first encounter with the little devils was in Deep River in 1962. We were driving to the west coast, and we decided to camp for the night in the town’s campground. By morning I had a ring of red itchy welts around my neck, my wrists and my waist and I was really, really glad to leave. We left the bugs behind about the Ontario/Manitoba border but the itchies stayed with me until June.

 If you can’t leave them behind, if you are working outside with both hands occupied, it can be pretty miserable. I have seen some of the neighbours, when they were cleaning up from sugaring, with blood dripping behind their ears. The flies are looking for a blood meal and they have, in fact, sharp jaws.

While we are here whining about wildlife, the other fly in the ointment is the deer fly. This is a much bigger insect, delta-winged, and it really bites hard. They are controllable with repellent, but miserable if you are stripped down to swim as they seem to like wet skin. They leave a welt on everyone. When I was a kid at my parents’ cottage we had horseflies, similar but bigger, that attacked us when we swam in the lake. I learned to swim underwater, as if you did that for a distance, you could lose one that was trying to take a chunk out of you.

We have an open field behind our house and at this time of year, if there is a windy day, the deer will come out and lie in the field to chew their cuds. I think the wind reduces the number of flies following them.

We had our first hot day today. Not enough to put the air conditioner on, but pretty warm. That will bring on the leaves and flowering trees, but anyone out and about this weekend should be covered up, in spite of the heat.

 

Friday, May 22^nd

As predicted. A warm week has produced blossom everywhere, starting with ED’s cherished magnolia, and the blossom has enticed the female hummingbirds north. We appear to have a dominant male, at least one other male and at least one female being courted by the male’s swinging U flybys that, with our window feeder, we see close up. Also for sure two and possibly three pairs of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. And a robin that has decided I should be scolded off the screen porch and who, accordingly, has a chipping fit whenever I go out there. Robins can be very opinionated. Back in the archive somewhere is a description of persuading a robin that nesting on the light fixture outside our bedroom door was not a good option. This may be her great-grandkid that is bugging me. Fair trade, turnabout. Hmm.

Just to mention, blackflies are rampant. We have a neighbour who got his garden in, he says, because the day was windy enough to blow them away. I am not sure I buy that, but we do have a heavier tree cover to cut the wind and allow the evil little things to lurk.

JG is off to do a dump run and pick up prescription meds en route. Up until the start of this year we had a ‘transfer station’ on the next concession over where all of our trash could go and where recyclables were collected. It closed down and now we have about a twenty minute drive to the station outside the village. Annoying. I know the township wants to save money wherever possible, and the transfer station had to have a keeper and the deposits sorted and moved, but it was lovely to be able to drive a bit down the road and unload it all. We have a lot of recyclables, paper being the premium but plastic a close second. I hope people in this area will stiffen their spines and keep doing the clean thing, even if it is more time and trouble. It is a real blow to our community hall, as it generates a lot of trash when we hold a function.

 Rats and all that. It is now the 23^rd and I am ending this babble. Goodness knows why anyone would read it this far. Except I have to to proof it.

-30 -

Bringing May Flowers

 May 11, 2026

I have been quiet for a few days, mostly because I put my back out and was prescribed a hydromorphone. Plays the dickens with my head. This morning I dumped half a cup of hot coffee on my lap. But, I should be doing a post about the spring flowers, and will try to concentrate.

The daughters came out yesterday with all sorts of goodies for lunch, the highlight being a Mother’s Day cake with flowers and butterflies on it. The butterflies were paper, but the rest was icing and a sheer, indulgent, delight. They then went for a walk in the woods, trundling around the trails they have known since they were small children, and came back with some lovely flower shots.

It is amusing, in passing, to note that the daughter who can squat right down beside a flower to get the best angle had her sixtieth birthday last month. I am pretty sure if I had tried to do that at the same age, they would have had to bring in a crane to get me up again.

A few posts ago, I put  up a photo of my two little girls dancing down a trail. That is one of the trails on our land (we have 300 acres and I can get confused). We bought the first hundred when the daughters were quite young, maybe nine and eight and they grew up spending weekends and holidays here, in a four-seasons cabin that we built. For most of that time we had no hydro and so we heated with a wood stove, and lit and cooked with gas that lived in large tanks at the back of the cabin. We carried water from a well and our toilet facility was a township-approved pit privy. (Read, outhouse, urban friends.)

What did we do here in all of our open time? We made and maintained trails. JG taught himself woodmanship and did an inventory of our trees, bushes and plants. We cut quantities of firewood. We were able to buy more land, some of it carrying good sugar maple and so we made a bit of maple syrup and got ourselves hooked into becoming maple people. This involved building a sugar house, cutting even more wood, stringing tubing, clearing more trails and, finally, boiling, bottling and selling. Plus eating a bit along the way. In winter we played in the snow - skis and snowmobiles - and in other seasons we worked. Or built. Evenings, we read. No electricity means no TV. 

Around where the girls became adults we were able to get electrical power and a telephone. JG redid the cabin with electric lights and electric stove and frig. Glorious. Only, in drilling out the inlets for the power, we enabled mice. Somewhere there was a hole big enough to admit them and we could not find it. We never have found it, and the cabin is now a storage place.

Sometime after that, JG retired. Finished work on a Friday and on Saturday we started in seriously to build our dream home on our land, still referred to, with very little reason, as ‘the farm’. I should write a post or more about that building spree. Someday. I have to get the flower photos up.