View from the North 40: The tick tic revisited: I hope it's not an annual thing

A tic is a frequent unconscious quirk of behavior, and a tick is a hard-to-kill, blood-sucking, parasitic arachnid that causes you to unconsciously and repeatedly scratch your head and body. Tic and tick sound exactly alike. Coincidence?

I think not.

I wasn’t going to write about ticks. I swear. I’m pretty sure I wrote a column about them last year. I had this whole thing about body part discoveries planned out for today. Brand new body parts. Imagine that. Then the ticks started coming on and they kept coming and now I can’t think of anything else.

And I can’t stop scratching my head.

The cat and I have had so many ticks on us that my husband can’t stop scratching his head either. It’s just a tic.

Until it’s a tick.

The little buggers are apparently experiencing a bit of a population explosion. I mean, it’s not as bad as that time a client brought me a horse to be trained, but I spent the first day pulling almost 150 ticks off the poor animal. Now that horse came from a place experiencing a real tick explosion, and I was experiencing the need for an hour-long shower.

My tic problem started with the cat who wanted in the house in the middle of the night. I was blissfully falling back to sleep while petting him, when my hand hit a thing in his hair and my eyes shot open in the dark — a moment that deserved a sound track with suspenseful music. No longer asleep — at all — I scoured around for the thing and sure enough, a tick.

I plucked the tick from the cat — I may or may not have pulled some hairs out with it, and I may or may not have cared — got up and disposed of the creepy crawly properly. I frisked the cat in the glow of light from the bathroom.

Nothing more.

A reassurance that helped me get back to sleep. But the next morning before leaving for work I found a tick crawling on the bedspread next to the sleeping cat. The tick was disposed of and the cat got a thorough body search before I left for work and again before bed that night.

I slept soundly and long. The sun was up when I finally awakened in the warm comfort of my bed that morning, last Saturday, stretching and yawning. I opened my eyes to the sight of a tick crawling across my pillow toward me.

You can take a moment to let that image sink in, but I’ll tell you that I took no such moments.

With the hyper-speed reflexes of visceral alarm, I slapped the tick away.

But you should know that this was not a good response.

Now, I had a tick loose — somewhere — in the bedroom. And I was unconsciously scratching my head as I started a serenity prayer of one long chanting stream of a certain four-letter S-word.

I found the tick, in the bed still.

The arachnid got a proper Viking death and funeral — you know, beheaded with a (relatively) long sword, incinerated in a funeral pyre and sent off in a river of water swirling down the toilet drain, but only because the tick was too small to shoot, hang, draw and quarter, disembowel and behead.

I also stripped and washed the bedding, and turned the heated mattress pad on thinking that its warm, white, fuzziness would attract any other stray ticks possibly lurking about. This was either clever or crazy, which, in my favor, are sometimes the same thing, but either way, no ticks were lured to that trap.

The highlights since that morning — and I’ve been working out in the tall grass and riding my horse a lot so there have been plenty of tick encounters to choose from this week — start with a stellar moment at work when I found a tick embedded in my scalp. While I was talking to my boss.

I was also 20 minutes late for work one morning because I found a tick crawling up my pant leg on the drive to the office and I was all, “Nope, this will not do.” I had to turn around, drive home (with the tick firmly pinched between two fingers), dispatch said tick, then completely strip, shake my clothes over the tub and redress, restarting my day tick-free and tic-full.

Oh, there was the evening I found three ticks on myself and two on the cat who had been supervising my fence work that afternoon.

And at this point I’ve lost track of the number of times my husband and I have searched ourselves and each other like monkeys. We just spend our days twitching and scratching and asking each other to check a niggly spot. I had to rub extra conditioner into my scalp the other day because it was getting tender from my itching tic.

I’m considering getting one of those doggy flea and tick collars, even though a white, plastic necklace laden with chemicals probably isn’t fashionable until after Memorial Day.

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I’m willing to break fashion codes like a rebel, or a desperate person, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .