In my 30 years of life, I have managed to successfully avoid chigger bites. In fact, I've been so successful at avoiding chiggers that I assumed they didn't live this far north, since I didn't get them in Pennsylvania or here in Indiana.
Until this summer.
First, the weekend before last Derrick and I took a trip to Indy and on the way back our car broke down 13 miles from our exit and 4 miles south of town. The car problems were pretty easily fixed--our alternator needed to be replaced (a $200 fix) and we'd just added towing to our car insurance, so we didn't even have to pay for that. But we did have to wait for an hour in knee-high grasses for the tow truck to come, and both Derrick and I were thoroughly bug-bitten by the end of the evening. Within a day or so both of us looked a bit like the guy in figure 2.
So, I was just about healed from that incident when I decided to be nice and weed in a friend's garden (I'm sharing garden space with three other families from church and Derrick and I spend a lot more time out in the garden, probably because we don't have to worry about kids yet. As you might imagine, or garden space has many fewer weeds than our co-gardeners and every so often I feel like being helpful). Truly, no good deed goes unpunished. My entire right side from the crease of my knee to the bottom of my bra is covered in red welts. On my left side the welts only extend up to what used to be my waist, but I think the welts are higher density to compensate for their smaller areal extent. Blech. Really, I wouldn't mind it so much if they just sucked up their meal of liquified skin cells and just dropped off--I have trillions of cells and skin cells are replaced pretty continuously, so I'm certain I wouldn't miss them. If they just didn't itch so much!
Death to chiggers!
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