Where the cicadas live.
I know, it's been, what, two months since I wrote about how much I hate living here, with longing references to how much I loved living in England even though I complained about the plumbing and the weather all the time when I did.
If you can't parse that sentence, sorry. I'll try to write better from now on.
To sum up the promise in that title, here are the latest reasons I've found for wishing I lived somewhere else, namely, somewhere near the 51st parallel, just a tad shy of the first longitude line.
Eleventy One: The heat.
Eleventy Two: The humidity.
Eleventy Three: The bugs.
It's not the heat, it's the humidity, but sometimes it's both, and the bugs that seem to be attracted to both. And not just the mosquitoes, but the noisy cicadas and crickets and other biting things that can infest a house if you have a dog and are not careful. (I found a tick on my neck one day. I can't even type that without grossing out.)
The cicadas, or maybe it's crickets, make a racket like the sound of 200 televisions tuned into 200 different chat shows. I don't know how the creatures can hear well enough to figure out which cicada to mate with, with all that awful noise going on. It reminds me of something I've struggled to forget...oh, I remember! It's my childhood.
And I know some smart people will have realized that I have air conditioning on this side of the Atlantic, which should make short work of that heat and humidity (that's why they're called "de-humidifiers", duh!) but they don't work as well as advertised, especially when they're approximately 50 years old. (We even have two, one for upstairs and one for downstairs and basement, and yes, we've added freon.) Ceiling fans, however, do a remarkable job of cooling the air to a livable level.
It's so bad that I find myself longing for Autumn, my least favorite season. That's when all the pretty stuff dies, including leaves, which we have a lot of around here.
I'll miss them, but if they take those noisy cicadas and the wretched heat with them, I'll be happy to rake them up in a few weeks. And by then I'll probably have a few more reasons to hate living here on the 38th parallel.
