"REVE, my youngest! Are you accepting guests?"
"C'mon over."
"It'll take about twenty minutes." I was visiting my mom, who is domiciled in a memory care facility not that distant, in a nearby corner of the Back of Beyond.
"Whatever. I'm in the gazebo. Just let yourself in through the garden gate."
REVE occupies a split level five miles outside the I-694 beltline, on a large drumlin, surrounded by marshland, which is shared among twenty or so houses. There's no crime in the neighborhood for the simple reason that no burglar could ever find it. His split looks like it was professionally decorated, to be photographed by a domestic journal, which happens to be the case. REVE's significant Linda, with whom he's been living in companionable sin for the last twenty-five years, is a semi-retired interior decorator. We've all been trapped in that waiting room with an outdated copy of Architectural Digest, thinking, "Yeah, but what does this place look like when flawed by human inhabitance?" Now I know. The disturbed gentility of La Maison Reve is enhanced by there being nobody to pick up the place.
REVE just had his aortic valve replaced and is on a two-pound weight restriction. Four days before his scheduled surgery, Linda tripped over a tarp she'd laid down in the garage, and landed on her right elbow, chipping off a quarter-sized chunk of her ulna, which started migrating, as bone chips do, into her upper arm. The chip was extracted and surgically pinned. REVE isn't permitted to sit in the front seat of a car for the next several weeks (airbag deployment could crush his surgically broken sternum), and Linda won't be out of her cast before then.
So I closed the garden gate and began picking my way gingerly along the flagstones set among the four hundred cultivars of hosta that Linda has assembled there, each with its little aluminum name plate stuck on a foot-tall pole, identifying the cultivar, who first bred it, in what year, and what its properties might be. Good to his word, REVE was in the gazebo, with a local prog rock station somewhere off in the background.
"This is my summer retreat," REVE said, in repose, once greetings had been exchanged. "But I have to bug-proof it sometime soon. Unfortunately, the weather hasn't been cooperating."
"The elevation and screens aren't sufficient?"
"No, not at all! There's a tiny, almost microscopic red arachnid - you see this screen?"
He was pointing, randomly, to the facing of the gazebo. It was a standard sort of porch screen.
"Three hundred of them can pass through one gap in that mesh. And they'll tattoo me. You see that I'm wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Both my shirt and pants have been treated with Picaridin. But I'll be treating the screens and woodwork in here with probably three or four different kinds of repellant."
"Your little red friends are probably windblown. They might not have any choice but to land here."
REVE sighed. "I've found a ring of bites all the way around my sock tops. The strange thing is, I'm the only one who's afflicted. Linda isn't. None of our guests. And it's not just the arachnids. Bugs love me. Have you ever visited the Lost 40?
"Never heard of it."
"It's about a hundred acres of virgin forest in northern Minnesota - we were on our way to visit Joanie at Rainy Lake and it wasn't much of a detour - it's virgin forest, misidentified as a swamp on the original plats. So when the lumber barons were bidding for timber around there, nobody laid claim to it. Why would you want to buy a swamp? So it's full of these towering red and white pines." He shrugged. "We figured it was worth a stop.
"So we drive in and find the parking lot. It's deserted. We get out and before we're even into the woods I'm attacked by deer flies. There must have been a dozen of them buzzing around my head." In the interests of full disclosure, REVE does a pantomime of a dozen deer flies flying about his head which is absolutely hilarious, all the more so because he's the only one who doesn't think it's funny.
"The deer fly is aggressive," I agreed. "When I used to go jogging in Tamarack Nature Preserve, which is only about five miles east of here, they'd land on the lenses of my eyeglasses."
"And fly into your ears. And when they bite, deer flies take out chunks. Horrible, horrible things. And there they were, trying to make a meal out of me. They ignored Linda. She could see that I was having a bad time of it, and let me go back to the car. So I sat in the car with a beer and a paperback and Linda went off in the woods for an hour. She came back gushing hour gorgeous it was. Not bothered by flies at all. Meanwhile, I'd been glancing up occasionally, and there were always at least two of them on the driver's side window, and a few more buzzing around. 'Forget it, I'm not coming out,' I told them, but they didn't seem to understand."
"I suppose you can't be accused of paranoia if the threat is real."
"Well, when Linda opened the passenger door, one did get in. We swatted it and started to pull away, and the other flies followed us. I'm doing five miles an hour, and they're right with us. Ten miles an hour - do you know how fast I had to go to lose them? Thirty!"
I could lose the deer flies in the Tamarack Nature Preserve with a three-quarter stride, and so gave tongue to the following fable.
Two birds were perched side-by-side on a power line, massaging their feet, when one of them turned to the other and said, "If you could have any superpower, what would it be? To turn doorknobs? To eat with a knife and fork?"
"That sounds unnatural," replied the second Bird. "I'd be happy just to fly through glass."
"I hope the robins in my neighborhood never figure that one out," REVE replied, grasping the moral by its tale. "Or if they do, they don't teach it to the flies."
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