I got a pretty bad bunion blister on my first day of classes--feet not used to wearing shoes, shoes I’d never broken in, shoulda worn socks--and I popped it by bumping my other foot into that foot! and it was all oozy. sorry to be gross but actually I don’t think I’d ever had a blister pop before? it was fascinating and excruciating. a weird thing about it was that putting it in the bathtub hurt worse! so anyway, as soon as it scabbed up it stopped hurting and now it’s mostly fine, except... a mosquito bit it! I remember being young and getting eaten up all the time. this one time in high school I got sixteen bites on one leg just from walking by the river at twilight in my cherries halter dress. but now I never do mosquito-y things and I sort of feel like there are fewer mosquitoes in my world? I rarely ever even see them. we don’t get any of them in our yard, now that we don’t live on the river, even though we are in a pretty overgrown urban neighborhood and get all kinds of other bugs and wildlife. but I was on the bay at night and then in the woods this weekend, so I got a total of one mosquito bite this year. and it was on my blister scab!
when my mom lived right on the flint river, she never got mosquitoes because all the spiders came up from the river and ate every kind of bug. the outside of the house was always covered in small spiders but there were never any other kinds of pests! there were occasional city bats but, now, that I think of it, there were never any frogs to eat any of the bugs or spiders. maybe the flint river is inhospitable to frogs. when we lived in the ancient house on the river in lansing, it was extremely buggy, because we were a few houses away from the water, and the block was a tiny urban forest. the bats didn’t keep the bugs at bay--there were so many bugs we also had a bat problem! lots of bugs, lots of bats.
