Living in the Country: Part One

To some degree, I have always lived in the country. Until my trip to Japan in the autumn of 2006, my time in cities had been only trips and visits, either to see my urbanite relatives, or to play tourist at famous museums and the like. The closest I ever came to the urban environment was my infancy in Rapid City, South Dakota – which at the time could barely be called a town, to hear my parents tell it – and a few years in neighborhoods while Dad job-hopped in the early Nineties, right after he got out of the Air Force. And even then, we were close to city parks and hiking trails, which Mom forced us all to use on a daily basis.

So it was no great change when my family moved out of our grandparents’ roomy country house and resettled outside town in an old two story wood and brick house that Dad likes to call the “cabin.” It was up on a hill in a young wood on the county border, with several sloping lawns and a long driveway that ran parallel to the dirt road. The house was curiously built into the hillside, with the top floor for living and the bottom floor for sleeping, unlike any house I had ever seen. The floors were connected by a spiral staircase that was (and is) painted a bizarre purple color that seemed to defy the house’s color scheme. But I loved that staircase and bounded up and down every day for several weeks.

One aspect I did not get used to were the arachnids. I had seen plenty of spiders at my grandparents’ (we even nicknamed the bathroom located near the dark back of the house, “the spider bathroom” for all the water spiders found in the sink on mornings) but these little buggers were the infamous Brown Recluse, and I dreaded even the sight of one. There were also scorpions in the corners, and it was not uncommon for the first year or two in that house for us to espy one of the vengeful beasts scuttling along the baseboards. The spiders and scorpions did not discriminate, and infested the entire house for years, though they tended to favor the dark downstairs – where we all slept. to fight back, my dad discovered invaluable sticky traps at Wal-Mart and we scattered these throughout the house, to great effect. The scorpions vanished and the spider population plummeted, although on occasion we would encounter a lone hunter stalking silently across the carpet in front of the TV. I have often considered the accidental flooding a few years back a miracle in disguise, because after we ripped up the ruined carpet, our spindle-legged foes were easier to point out, and after Dad got up the gumption to tile the downstairs, the Brown Recluses stand out like bandy-legged caltrops.

Strangely, despite living in that house for over ten years, not one of my family has ever been stung.