Home on the range

We spent Sunday night and most of yesterday in Florence with my parents. What was first my normal life and then a source of constant amazement for me has become a virtual amusement park for my children. I remember being in high school and thinking, I bet nobody else’s dad has rattlesnakes in the freezer. The two big rattlesnakes are gone now, but there’s a newly caught corn snake in an aquarium in the shop, very calm and easily handled, even by a three-year old while his mother hovers over him trying to contain him to the tail end—all the while his Papa is saying, “Want him to lick you with his tongue?” while his Grandma and I are saying, “NO!” The Gator four wheeler, the Kubota tractor, the fourty-seven bream my father caught that morning, the bird boxes filled with flying squirrel nests and titmouse eggs and newly hatched bluebirds—all like the homemade version of some imagined Disney Southern Nature Park to the kids. My parents don’t even have a farm, but it certainly felt that way when I was in school (which was of course mightily embarrassing), and anytime it doesn’t feel quite farmlike enough, well, we can always walk over across the road and look at the neighbor’s cows and buffalos.

It’s easy to tell when we’ve been to Florence, because afterwards we can count our mosquito bites. Will has about four, Laura has two, and, because I have not only more body mass but also am slower, I have eleven (Chris apparently is not tasty to mosquitoes because he never gets bit anymore). My father only recently gave up pointing out the problematic attire we wear allowing these bites—shorts! sandals! why don’t we wear jeans and socks like him, who never is bitten?—and we don’t use bug spray often at all because I’m always afraid of spraying some toxic chemical on my kids, particularly Mr. Finger Sucking William. So we just stay outside and suffer for it later—I do have an array of post-visit remedies, Benadryl and an Aveeno spray, not to mention the blue stuff, which the kids like, but which unfortunately gets all over clothes and sheets and the couch. I suppose in some way the nature park makes it worth the bites, even though they last a lot longer than the feel of the snakeskin. But maybe not as long as the memory of it.