The Tick

I heard my wife Shriek from the other room in the den. So, I walked in to see what was the matter. She was very upset because there was a tick walking on her Computer keyboard to her Imac there. I calmly put a piece of paper for the tick to crawl onto and then I walked to the bathroom and flushed the tick down the toilet. In other circumstances if the tick had bit someone like me or another member of my family I likely would have squashed the tick to relieve it of some of its karma from biting a human and so giving it a better rebirth somewhere by so doing. But, I didn't feel it deserved to be squashed and instead just flushed it down the toilet.

I guess one of our dogs, (probably our Corgi) had picked it up on the long walk up a coastal mountain trail yesterday and it had somehow jumped onto my wife's computer at some point. So, though it scared my wife pretty bad because still has memories of one spring when our daughter was a baby when we found 18 ticks between the four of us including on my then older daughter who was about 7 to 10 years of age. Ever since then ticks have really creeped her out partly because of potential lyme disease. Also, one of our God daughters got lyme disease from a tick in high school even though she is okay now. But at that time it made her joints swell up and caused her a lot of problems for a few  years. She recently had a baby and both mother and daughter are fine.

So, I guess I understand why my wife was so freaked out. It's just that my father taught me to remain calm no matter what when there is an emergency. Someone has to always be cool headed enough to survive any emergency for the rest of the people in the family. And since my Dad has been gone since 1985 the responsibility to always remain calm no matter what now falls to me. But sometimes that is a lot of weight to carry. Luckily, this was an easy time to deal with even though I never like to kill anything.

But then there are things like ticks, rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, Recluse spiders and various other things that one cannot ordinarily allow to live in proximity with other humans. So, though I don't like killing things there are some things that just have to go and so I have to be the one to do it because there is no one else here (unless my son is visiting) who is like this.