Welcome to the Club - Summer 2021

Welcome to ...
THE Club
CASH IN ON CLEAN UP!
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ELECTRONIC WASTE RECYCLING
Copper • Brass • Aluminum • Lead • Stainless Steel
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WE BUY & RECYCLE
ALL SCRAP METAL
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MON-FRI 7:30-4:30
1279 Plank Rd, Sarnia • 519-337-3779 • www.trijan.ca SATURDAY 7:30-12
Laughter is the best medicine - here’s to your health.
Seniors
SAVE 20%
Every Thursday!*
*Discount applies to
regular priced merchandise
Available with a PC Optimum card at
the following Shoppers Drug Mart stores:
510 Exmouth Street, Sarnia
123 Mitton Street South, Sarnia
420 Lyndoch Street, Corunna
A ‘bugbear,’ says the dictionary, is
anything that causes an imaginary fear or
anxiety. Imaginary? Methinks not. In my
vocabulary, a bug is a bug is a bug.
A psychiatrist might blame a childhood
trauma, when I plopped on a bearskin rug,
jumped up with a wasp (literally as snug
as a bug in a rug) stinging my hand for
invading its private space. The start of it all.
Decades later, in cottage country,
I earned the name ‘Broom Lady’ for
swishing a broom to ward off things with
wings. Thankfully, in my hearing at least,
nobody suggested I ride it.
‘June bug’ is a blatant misnomer. It’s
always May when we open up the cottage,
but these critters’ hard shells hit doors and
windows on determined dive-bombing
missions. June indeed!
My produce patch beside the cottage
netted summery salad stuff until one
lunchtime when I was picking some
greens for lunch. Nibbling on a young
leaf, I inadvertently chomped a
fat caterpillar in half before it
had time to squiggle out of
the way. Too late, it was
decapitated between my
teeth and the eyes in the
head section gave me a look never to
forget. Needless to say, the garden went to
seed and I shopped in town every summer.
‘Heartburn’ with Jack Nicholson and
Meryl Streep was the unfortunate video
choice one rainy night when neighbouring
cottagers came over. When Streep’s
fingers mimed a spider’s trip up the water
spout, the ditty ‘Inky Dinky Spider’ in the
background, I shivered, grabbed a sweater,
but soon had to escape, feigning a sudden
chill. No, don’t turn it off. No, I don’t need
the village doctor. I’ll just go to bed. I lay
watching a horror movie instead, to clear
my mind of spiders.
Next morning I tried to ward off
questions: I’m fine, thanks, must have
been something quick that hit me. No
way would I reveal the well-kept secret of
my shame.
As a pre-teen at summer camp, I’d
climbed into my bunk that first night,
then instantly screamed and raced into
the woods, followed by counsellors and
kids who fortunately caught up to me at
the lake edge. Hysterically I blurted out
that a huge spider was on my pillow.
End of summer camp forever.
Unfortunately, Meryl Streep,
Welcome to ... Summer 2021
A Case of Bugmania
by
Jean Leedale Hobson, West Vancouver, BC
From Daytripping Magazine, May-June 2007
your Inky Dinky Spider interpretation
resurrected an experience this fan thought
she’d outgrown.
Is it any wonder, with my painful past,
that I freaked out recently when I spied
tiny brown ‘somethings’ on the rug?
Jumping up, I flung away the handmade
heating bag from my aching shoulder and
stared, petrified, at the invaders. They
stayed still, not a skitter across the
floor, not a flap of a wing. Probably,
I reasoned, they were as
frozen with fear of me as
I was of them. Panic took
over as I also spotted a few on
the chair arm. BUGS in my living
room? Oh no! Oh yes!
I dashed to the hardware store, discreetly
picked up a can of insect spray, paid and
got out of there fast. For an hour I sprayed
everything in sight, wishing I’d bought
a gas mask too. Can emptied, I treated
myself to two aspirins and a pot of tea
as a chaser.
All that zeal had made my shoulder
worse, so I reheated the bag in the
microwave. Two, four, six shiny brown
specks lay on the counter. Curbing an urge
to phone 911, I looked closer. Not bugs,
FLAXSEED! A bit of the stitching had split,
letting the seeds escape. No local charity
would have wanted the chair, saturated
with strong-smelling spray, so it went to
the dump. But did I explain my new velvet
rocker to the family on their next visit? Not
on a bug’s life I didn’t!
In my loathing of creepers, crawlers,
wrigglers or flutterers, there is one
exception however. I am a
pushover for those red-andblack,
polka-dotted, gardenfriendly,
aphid-guzzling beetles
we call ladybugs.
My son was asthmatic as a
child. If I could find a ladybug, I’d
gently transfer her to his bed tray, asking
her to babysit, the child watching in delight
as she crawled back and forth for his
amusement. When her nanny stint was
over I’d tell her to fly away home, hoping
her house wasn’t on fire, her children all
gone, as the nursery rhyme predicted. I
wouldn’t want that fate to happen to her.
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want it to
happen to a wasp, a June bug or even an
inky dinky spider.
Now that, for this Broom Lady, is saying
a lot!
From
BABY BOOMER
to Empty Nester
Maybe it's time to downsize
We can help
Text DOWNSIZE to 85377
not intended to solicit
clients under contract
EXIT REALTY TWIN BRIDGES
Brokerage - Independently Owned and Operated
519-542-1000
P A G E
16
(Rarely Heard Any More) “Can we go to the five and dime store?”