Years ago, when the kids were tiny, we moved a shed into the tree belt behind the ranch house. We insulated it, added electricity and a baseboard heater, and it became my writing shack.
At that time, I was also recording audio “postcards” for an NPR affiliate, which, in retrospect, was a wild thing to do in the same small house as two toddlers. I would record during nap times or after they went to bed, but it was not ideal. When the writing shack became part of my life, things got much easier. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I ever successfully wrote or recorded without it.
Now that the kids are older, finding time to work on writing or recording doesn’t mean stealing hours from my own sleep, or when the man of the ranch can take over kid duty as they go their own way a lot more of the time. I still use the writing shack, though. It is a magical place, surrounded by whispering ash trees and different migrating birds depending on the season. I don’t need it the way I once did, but I love it just as much.
In related news, because things tend to run in feast or famine mode here on the Northern Plains, every summer we end up with a defining insect infestation for the year. Some years it’s ticks, some years it’s grasshoppers. This year, with all the rain, I thought it was going to be mosquitoes, and there were plenty! But the runaway insect crop turned out to be flies. Flies in the kitchen, flies in the barns, flies in my writing shack — flies everywhere all summer long.
Summer turned into fall. The flies in the barns grew sparse. The flies in the kitchen grew sparser, too. But the flies in the writing shack got … worse. I’d given up writing anywhere other than my bedroom because the flies were so bad in the shack, the constant buzzing far more distracting than any toddler could ever be.
September turned into October and then November, and I kept thinking the flies would die off (which the drifts of carcasses indicated they were) but new droves of flies kept appearing.
I would clean the shack periodically, each time thinking I’d gotten them all, and each time returning to find more. Surely after the first hard freeze, they’ll die off, I’d say. Surely after the first really, really hard freeze.
Surely after the first really, really, REALLY hard freeze…
I don’t have words to adequately describe the scale of the infestation over the last few weeks. I would enter the shack to find thousands upon thousands of flies covering the windows, the doors and circling the ceiling light and rafters, the buzzing as oppressive as an invasion of locusts. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, or hope to witness again.
This would be bad under any circumstances, but I have a new album due next month. I had to get the flies under control, or I was going to have an unwelcome choir for all the new songs, as microphones in that small of a space pick up the buzz of even a single fly, never mind a few million.
Last weekend, I decided enough was enough. I left the heat and lights on overnight to draw out all the flies that were apparently nesting (and also procreating) in the walls, hung ribbons of fly tape everywhere, and then spent hours swatting and vacuuming up the flies that the tape didn’t catch. After three full days of this, I winnowed the population down to a dozen or so.
I now know far too much about the wide variations of fly breeds we have here on the ranch, including which are the most annoying. (Spoiler alert: It’s the chubby black ones with iridescent blue heads… They are considerably craftier than the average fly.) And I am thankful for fly swatters, fly strips and the end of fly infestations. I hope you get to celebrate this week with something you are equally thankful for!
