Bugs

I hate bugs. I love bugs. I am a nature girl, but I am deathly afraid of Lyme disease and equine encephalitis. I work at the public library reference desk. I have heard too many tales of woe and my imagination is altogether too vivid.

About 6 or 8 Friday mornings ago, I had the morning off work for some reason. I think my boss had set me off the afternoon before and I was still reeling from some inane insult or another. They stream out of her unedited mouth at all of us.

I was heading towards third beach in Middletown to swim my craziness and sillies out;
http://www.middletownri.com/government/6/188/middletown-parks
when I decided I needed to stop at Dunlap Wheeler Park, my mother’s waterfront memorial park on the Middletown/Newport line. I saw a man picking up trash and I thanked him. It turned out he had been the brother-in-law of the man I had had a brief disastrous marriage to in the early ‘80s. I had met this kind man on a bicycle once before when I had been in emergency mode; delivering my 11-year-old stepson so I could disappear to New Hampshire on the bus to the comfort of my dear friend Virginia.

Soon five more people trickled in to the park to do Tai chi. The free tai chi class was wonderful. The deed for Dunlap Wheeler Park stipulated that the park is for public use, no profit could ever be derived from it. The tai chi class used to be held close by at the Norman Bird Sanctuary and it cost money, but bugs plagued the participants so they moved to bug-free Dunlap Wheeler Park. I mentioned a small bit of the park history to them. They invited me to join them. We took deep breaths of the early morning ocean air, saluted the sea and the sky with our feet, our arms, our feet, and our entire bodies.
They all invited me to come back any Friday morning at 8 am to practice more tai chi with them. It was a real charge. I felt like I had struck gold in my mother’s park in Middletown, Rhode Island. I had missed my swim, forgotten about my dreaded boss and risen above the crud of everyday life.

My mother’s 9/10 of an acre big park catches a constant ocean breeze and is bug-free. In 1970, the town of Middletown, Rhode Island dedicated this park to Anne Slater Dunlap, an early and unpopular environmentalist, who was labeled as an instigator in her obituary. My mother loved trees. She had degrees in both botany and biology, and had studied with Richard Goodwin, the granddaddy of the environmental movement of this country. Her garden club planted five small Japanese black pines near the three corners of this park so we could remember her good deeds for the town. Now, nearly 40 years later, these are some of the only Japanese black pines left on Aquidneck Island. It is because the constant breeze scares away the bugs and the bug that carries the germ that killed the rest of them.

I hate bugs but I could not live without them.

Photo by Philip R. Hopper