Last July, when we first arrived in the Pelion region of Greece, the cicadas screeched and the mosquitos bit. Otherwise, the insects here didn’t seem particularly remarkable. This summer, on the other hand, has been filled with arthropods and arachnids, creepers and crawlers, flyers and chirpers. And it’s not just the multitudes that is noticeable, but the size of these things. Holy big bugs, Batman!
It can be a bit distressing at times. Like every morning, when I do my run around the “Ranch,” which is what we’ve come to call the olive-grove covered hillsides that spread out from our house. It’s a nice, two-mile, up-and-down loop on two-track trails wending through the olive trees and other shrubs and I usually do it just as the sun’s hitting the bushes and waking up the bugs. Or maybe they’re just finishing their coffee. Whatever it is, the are hopping, flying, and screeching, quite often into me: cicadas dive-bomb my head, katydids leap into my eyes, giant grasshoppery things try to fly into my mouth.
Riding or running with your mouth open in Colorado is likely to get you a bit of extra protein and maybe a small bug caught between your teeth. No biggie. But these Greek monsters can give you a fat lip, knock your tooth right out, or get jammed in your trachea. Auslander Strangled by Cicada, the headlines might read.
There are other dangers, as well. One especially large species of spider (a two-inch leg-span, I would say) spins lovely, intricate webs in which to ensnare breakfast. Fine with me. Except: They like to stretch their webs across the very trail on which I run. Usually I see the web just in time to come to a screeching halt (then, as I overcorrect, fall on my derriere), which must look very odd to any observers. Sometimes, though, I run right through it. The ensuing panic-dance must look even stranger.
I’m assuming the swarms are the result of a wet winter and spring, followed by a hot, dry summer. When we moved here, I thought we were getting away from the snow. I was wrong, as I found out in early March, when an inch or two piled up at the house and far more than that accumulated at the high-points on the Ranch. It was followed by drenching rains well into the spring. Then the precipitation just stopped one day, temperatures started soaring into the 90s, and all of the flowers and grass and lush vegetation of May became brittle and eerily flammable by early August. There’s rain in the forecast this afternoon, but I’m not holding my breath.
Other than dodging insects, we’ve been working and wallowing in the Greek summer, which included visits from friends and family in May and June. I have not one, but five separate ongoing freelance contracts right now, which fills up my weekdays and then some (meetings with folks in Colorado or on the West Coast have to occur in my evening, stretching out the workday even further). But then I’m done, I can pour myself a cold glass of minerally Greek white wine, sit back, and listen to the cicadas sing before putting together dinner from our garden (tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplants, and lots and lots of herbs).
Lydia has been here most of the summer, as well, and she’s been cooking up various delights, most of which include lemons from the overly-prolific tree in our yard. She makes pasta, limoncello, lemon bars, lemonade — you name it. And now it’s fig season and it’s a whopper: Big, juicy fruit hanging from the branches. And our house is surrounded by feral blackberry bushes that are also covered in fruit. The hot days do pay off at dinner time.
