Where I Caught The Critter That Crawled In My Sinuses

Something crawled into my head. It is pounding around in my sinuses looking for a way out. I would like to assist it, but it is moving around from right to left rapid-fire so that it is impossible to pinpoint the exact sinus cavity it is currently trying to break out of. I trust it is something cute and furry and loveable. It better be. I probably caught it on our hike yesterday.

Which Makes Perfect Sense, Because It Was The Hike Of The Damned From The Very Beginning

I decided to do this 52 Hikes thing with my kids this year. I saw some ad for it, and I didn’t click on it, but what I gathered is that you pay money to this random company, next you mind your own business while hiking weekly, and then you get some piece of crappy plastic as a reward for paying the company money while minding your own business. I’ve decided to forgo the part where I pay money and get a crappy piece of plastic, and instead just hike.

The boy has a lot of places he wants to explore, and I have a lot of grammar I want him to accomplish, and this 52 Hikes thing is a dangling carrot. Instead of me with the fierce look of a lioness saying through gritted teeth something like get the grammar done, kid I can say something like hurry up and get the grammar done so that we have time to go explore that forest with a thousand pine trees and five thousand palmettos!

Because This Is Florida, And That Is All We Have In Forests—Pine Trees And Palmettos

Lots of them. Or so I said to myself when I thought of all the state forests the boy has been enthusiastically waiting to investigate. But there is so much more here, and so much hidden among those palmettos.

I regret so deeply that Florida is so heavily populated now. I must be reincarnated from one of the Florida crackers of the early 1900s. I long for sable palms—not those exotic varieties the northerners always plant—against a golden sunset. I want my feet in the scrappy weeds intermingled in the sand of the orange grove. I want to balance awkwardly on the cypress knees sticking out of squishy mud next to a brown river. I need the pungent smell of salt and the sharp edge of oyster shells.

Sweet, real Florida.

It’s Really All My Fault It Was The Hike Of The Damned, Because I Went To Pizza Hut

For shame, starting a trip into the real Florida with not real pizza. Or at least not good pizza. The kids had their free Book-It certificates though, and free food is free food. You don’t turn down free food. I found myself standing in front of a cash register and a very large piece of plexiglass that probably had a lot more Staph on it than Covid. The room started to sway and a sense of panic washed over me—vertigo. Until I realized the plexiglass was swinging, not my inner ear. The man with my pizza had a mask on that covered one teeny bit of his squirrely looking beard. It was composed of long curling gray hairs sprawled outward like a million individual corkscrews eagerly seeking their cork mate to give a proper screwing.

I had the feeling at least one of those hairs was on my pizza, but I pushed the thought from mind.

We drove to our hike location—a place in Northeast Florida I had been to a few times years ago; a place that was always empty of human activity; a place I could safely take Big Dog without worrying about him swallowing anyone’s dog whole…

…a place that now humans flock to like a bunch of northerners running from snow. And with their Big Dog appetizers trotting right at their sides.

It was around then that the boy let out a groan of misery as he looked at his pizza. Had he noticed the beard hair? Was I going to be forced to be a littering hypocrite by way of throwing the miniature pizza box out the window to avoid wanting to puke on my steering wheel?

“My throat is sore,” the boy moaned. I knew that he could not be faking, because if he had been his theatrics would have started the moment the grammar book had been opened that morning.

Yesterday's Hike Will Probably Be Our Shortest Hike Out Of All 52

The boy wandered around like he had swallowed a frog and the sliminess just didn’t quite want to wash down. The girl—a true Floridian—informed me that socks are hot and ridiculous and should under no circumstances ever be worn, January be damned. Big Dog stayed behind with the windows rolled down part way, patrolling our parking space with eyes sharp on any suspicious looking Pomeranians.

But it's alright, because the salt air was pungent, the mud as quick-sand-like as any mud ought to be, the sky a perfect brilliant blue, the wire grass like nature's softest windchimes, and the oysters both chalky and sharp beneath the feet.

And it was sometime around then that the baby squirrel crawled into my sinuses. Or maybe it is a gopher mouse. A green anole? The southern toad?

Watching Suspicious Pomeranians Is Exhausting

Whatever it is, it better get out. I’ve got an elixir of garlic, ginger, horseradish, onion, and jalapeno, and I’m not afraid to use it.

It’s so strong it might even chase a virus out of me.