Monday on Lake Superior

The day started with rain and heavy winds and a tick lodged in my husband’s wrist.

In the middle of the night, my husband thought what he heard was our big, fearless Alaskan husky getting himself out of the bathtub downstairs where he had apparently gone to escape the wind and rain coming in the window on to the old sofa in our room that he recently claimed as his favorite night sleep spot.

Earlier or later, I’m not sure, I awoke to the same husband holding a flashlight in his mouth, standing naked on a kitchen stool to take the smoke detector down from the ceiling where, unbeknownst to me, it had been beeping for a good while. I would hear an actual smoke alarm go off despite my hearing loss but the beeping is meaningless to me. This means that if the old man dies, I’ll never know when to change the smoke detector batteries. He’s aware of this but doesn’t dwell on it.

So, back to the tick. At first glance, it looked like a perfectly round mole. Had he always had a mole on his wrist? Do I know where are the moles are? But looking closer, I could see the mole’s wee legs and so I leapt out of bed to set up surgery at the dining room table with the overhead light, a table lamp, my hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, and my extremely perfect, overpriced tweezers which I bought at the gas station in our tiny town a few years ago needing to urgently tweeze something (I don’t remember what) and for which I paid way too much money, like when you buy a can opener at the camp store when all you have to eat is a can of hash.

I endeavored to extract the tick as instructed in the laminated first aid instruction sheet (two-sided) that I bought along with an amazing 56-item first aid kit for our camping trip last month in the Smoky Mountains. Get the whole tick with the tweezers, it said, and be careful not to leave the head. So I took a few practice tweezes, feeling the tick’s intense grip on my husband’s quite hairy wrist. And then I made my move. It was a precise, elegant, whole tick removal. I squeezed the tick with a paper towel, peeked to certify death and saw its legs still flailing about. I hit it with the blunt end of the tweezers, the legs still moved. My husband folded the paper towel over three times and hammered it with his fist. Then we threw it in the trash.

The damn thing has probably spent all day plotting revenge. Unnecessary since we have to sleep tonight in the bed from whence said tick came.

Other than that, this was a spectacular day on Lake Superior. 30-40 mile per hour winds, 5-8 foot waves, dreadfully overcast and then brilliantly sunny, so windy that our dear Punchy’s floppy ears stood straight up like a hyena’s and we had to wear winter hats and our hoodies tied tight and walk with our hands in our pockets. It was spectacular.