Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
It's been going on for decades, as anyone who lives in the country will understand.
But the terms were clarified a couple of weeks ago when I underwent a bit of an epiphany with my landscapers.
I ask this team to show up annually and do the heavy lifting for my garden. I'm not a wimp, and--trust me--I do most of it on my own. But these fellows--(and at least so far they've all been fellows)--show up, do the hard work for a day or three, and make it easier for me to keep everything under control for the entire season. I love them.
This year, the team was from the Philippines. Often they're Mexican. But not this year. Regardless, they're documented and brought in legally, something which their bringer-inner has told me in the past costs him tens of thousands of dollars each year. (I've suggested--laughingly, before anyone on this site descends to chastise me for making fun--that he might simply want to tell them to swim across the Rio Grande and come in some other way.) But he's too honorable for that. As a result, he brings in family members year after year who enjoy working for him, and who repeatedly sign up and show up for me and others, year after year.
I've come to welcome them, year in and year out. They are dear men and the hardest workers I've ever known.
This year is no different.
At some point, while the guys were doing their usual excellent job, one of them (whose English wasn't so great) became very agitated. "Small Beasts! Small Beasts! Very Dangerous!" he yelled while pointing.
God. I inspected the area he was exclaiming about. Was there a snake? A raccoon? Some other deadly creature?
I just couldn't see it.
Eventually, I did. A piece of a wasp nest which must have blown out of a tree during a previous storm.
And I took care of it, on the ground, and before it escalated.
The other day, the same "small beasts" invaded my kitchen. They'd done it late last fall, before the nest must have died off. But this year they started early. I went out this morning on a couple of errands, and when I returned home my kitchen window had no fewer than eight yellowjackets crawling around on it.
So today I called the local pest control folks.
It wasn't quite such a multi-cultural event. But it was effective.
Thank God.
Discussion (18)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
The small beasts around here are scorpions. I hate the creepy little bas*ards. They are not dangerous unless you have an allergy but the sting is fairly painful. We control them by spraying the house. If I thought it would work I’d hang the dead ones around the house to scare off the rest.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Oh, yuck. I can totally relate to the scorpion thing. When I was a small child in Nigeria we had to keep our slippers on the bed, under the mosquito net, because if we left them on the floor they might very well be full of scorpions by the next morning...
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Based on one sting years ago, I check my shoes every morning when I visit my sis in San Antonio. Every time.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Growing up in the Ozarks we had a lot of wasps, and many more mud daubers. The out building Dad used as a shop was full of them - the walls would buzz on a hot day.
They left us alone if we left them alone. Although I cooked a lot of them with a lighter and a can of starter fluid.
You're seeing five of 18 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.