It’s tick season again, and if you’re like me, you hate those bloodthirsty little parasites (who doesn't?). Luckily for you, gentle reader, I’ve had quite a bit of experience in removing ticks, having grown up on a farm with lots of long grass around (we called it “hay”) and from living in the very state that holds the town for which Lyme disease was named. I have more ticks than dandelions in my back yard. When those vampiric goons dig in, here’s what you need to do to get rid of them:

1.     Get out the peanut butter. There’s a popular old wives’ tale that says if you put peanut butter over a tick, the peanut butter will start to smother the little bugger, and he’ll release his lockjaw bite on your flesh. This is a total lie. The peanut butter is for the snack you’ll want before this is over.

2.     Find a pair of needle-tip tweezers. Nothing but needle-tip will do. I can’t stress this enough. Regular tweezers will cause you to rip off the tick’s abdomen, leaving its filthy, diseased head still firmly burrowed under your skin. Tick heads are infinitely more difficult to remove than whole ticks.

3.     Place the tips of the tweezers as close to your skin and the tick’s hellspawn pincers as possible, squeeze, and gently start pulling. Slowly, slooowly . . . pop! What the—didn’t I TELL you not to use regular tweezers? Now you’ve got a tick belly leaking your freshly sucked blood all over the place, and a half a tick still stuck in you. What happens next is of your own making, pal!

4.     Start sharpening the filleting knife. You’ve got a tick head that’s got to come out, my friend, and the only way to do that is to cut it out. Regretting not splurging on the needle-tip tweezers now, aren’t you?

5.     Using your crappy regular tweezers, pull on the tick head hard enough to pull your skin away from your body. I know it’s gross. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

6.     Use the filleting knife to gently saw away at the two points where the tick pincers have a death-lock grip on your skin. Luckily, I’ve found that the person with the tick often passes out from the pain at some point during the process, which makes it easier to saw.

7.     The heck with it. When “gentle” fails to get you very far, just start hacking away. You’re going to wind up with a hole in your skin anyway, might as well gouge it out yourself. Continue to do this until the chunk of skin with the tick head still embedded separates from your body.

8.     Stuff the gaping, bleeding hole that remains with gauze. Don’t use cotton. Hey! You saw what happened when you ignored my tweezers advice, didn’t you? Put that cotton ball down!

9.     Collect the tick abdomen and tick head (with your flesh still attached) and bring it to the doctor. Put it in a safe container, like an old pill bottle. Don’t worry, you’ll get a new pill bottle when the doctor prescribes antibiotics for you.

10. Enjoy a spoonful of peanut butter. Go ahead. You’ve earned it, and you’ll have a battle scar for the rest of your life to show for it.

If you asked me, I wouldn’t say I live in the country. I’ve lived on a farm and an island. The luxuries I have now, like home delivery of mail, and a shiny Dunkin’ Donuts in the center of town, seem positively urban to me. However, I’ve had friends visit who have subsequently implied that I live in the middle of nowhere. Unfair, I say. Your town has two measly traffic lights, they point out. Not true, we have three. You missed the one they put in when we got that new-fangled CVS downtown. Then my houseguests stop arguing because they’re laughing too hard at the fact that I seem to sincerely believe my town has a downtown.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I live in a rural area. There are certain aspects about country life that maybe you city folk don’t understand. Here are a few:

1. Takeout, not delivery. Oh, how I envy you people who can call up a pizza place and actually have a pie delivered. If we want pizza, we have to get in the car and drive somewhere to pick up a pizza. There is no Dominos or any other pizza chain to deliver in 30 minutes or less. On the bright side, we save a ton of money, because we’re often not ambitious enough to drive for our food.

2. Wifi, not satellite. Nature’s nice and all, but because of the stupid trees surrounding us, we can’t get satellite television. Again, we save a ton of money, because with no cable or satellite bills, we watch television online. The downside: we have to stay off Facebook on Sunday nights to avoid Walking Dead and Downton Abbey spoilers, because the episodes aren’t available online until the next day. And I would sincerely appreciate it, Peter Dudar and Jeff Strand, if you would wait to post your Survivor comments until 24 hours after it airs.

3. Taco who? My town has no fast food, save the one Dunkin’ Donuts I mentioned previously. If we want McDonalds, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken, we have to drive thirty minutes. Remember when I complained about having to drive to get pizza? The pizza place is only twenty minutes away, and we can’t even muster up the energy to go there. We eat fast food exactly never.

4. Wildlife 101. When Jason first met me, he could not identify a woodchuck on sight, nor did he know the difference between a fox and a coyote. Now he can identify animals based on their poop, which we find frequently in the back yard. We’ve seen deer, foxes, bobcats, skunks, possum, coyotes, coyotes eating possums, red-tailed hawks, bats, owls, and more. The upside: I have never, ever, seen a cockroach outside of a zoo.

5. What public transportation? I had a roommate in college from the Bronx. She didn’t have her driver’s license because she’d never needed it. Conversely, we were taking drivers’ ed at 15 in my hometown. You couldn’t not have a license. The closest bus station was a 20-minute drive away. Now that I’ve moved one town over, it’s 30 minutes away. So I could drive 30 minutes and take a 30-minute bus ride to work, or I could drive the 40 minutes it takes to get to my job.

Believe me, I’m not complaining. I lived on an island where home delivery of mail or newspapers simply didn’t exist, the gas station was limited to alternating hours on alternating days (and believe me, if you couldn’t make it there between 9 AM – 12 PM on Saturdays, you were walking the rest of the weekend), and where Chinese food was a fancy mainland dish we could only dream of. So I’ll take the half-hour drive to Taco Bell. I may not go there often, but at least I can if I want to. And in my world, that’s as close to city living as I care to get.

Now please excuse me—I have to go feed a taco to the bobcat in the back yard.    

On Monday, Jason sent me this text.

I suppose seeing a large turtle in the back yard is exciting for some people. Personally, I’ve seen a lot of them in my lifetime, which is how I immediately knew what this one was intending to do.  When I was a kid, my dad caught a snapping turtle the size of Gamera that barely fit into an oil drum, and the memory of that beast snapping a tree limb in half has stuck with me all my life. Since then, I have preferred to maintain what I call a “preserving my digits and extremities”-type distance from snapping turtles.

Jason texted me a little while later. She’s still out there, he typed. I’m going to take more pictures.

This concerned me a little bit. I didn’t feel that Jason was paying this turtle the amount of respect she deserved. Please leave her be, I texted back. The worst possible time to approach a snapping turtle is when it is a female laying eggs. Guess what that is?  A FEMALE. LAYING EGGS.

About an hour later, Jason called me on my work line.

“The turtle’s digging holes in your flower bed,” he announced.

“Okay,” I said.

“I thought you’d be upset. She’s already dug up a half-dozen flowers,” he said, surprised.

“General rule of thumb that I like to live by: let snapping turtles do whatever they want. If she starts weaving a lei out of the flowers and inviting all the other turtles to dance the cha-cha with her, please let her.” The memory of Oil Drum Gamera still crunched in my head.

“She’s dug, like, three or four holes already,” he said.

“Okay. She’s just looking for exactly the right spot. I would advise letting her. Snapping turtles are allowed to be fussy. Also, and I can’t reiterate this enough, do NOT approach or touch her,” I said.

“Sheesh, I know already! I’m gonna go watch her,” he said, hanging up.

A short time later, I noticed that Jason had posted a video online of our snapping turtle laying her eggs in my carefully mulched flower bed. The video ended with an angry turtle charging at Jason’s phone. He did text me to assure me he still had all of his fingers and toes, so I felt a little better. Then he asked if I was okay with the fact that the flower bed was now a turtle hatchery. Baby snapping turtles, I texted back. Can’t wait.

He was off to work that afternoon, and of course, our girl hadn’t left the lawn yet. Can you please check the yard when you get home to make sure the snapping turtle didn’t get caught in the deer netting around the garden? he texted me. I read it twice and texted him back: And if she is caught in the netting . . . what, exactly, would you like me to do about it?

Nature: sometimes, it’s better to give it the healthy, hands-off respect it deserves.