It’s fly season on the High Plains

Those breezy days when there’s just a little chill in the air are perfect for opening up the windows and letting some fresh air circulate through the house. link

In this country there aren’t many days that fit the bill.

Open the windows on the wrong breezy day and you’re likely to find a thin layer of silt covering everything you own.

Slightly damp days have a tendency to remind one’s nose of where the burgers and the milk come from, and open windows on a hot day mean a spike in the electric bill trying to get things livable again.

So when one of those slightly cool, pleasantly breezy days comes along, it’s an opportunity not to be passed up.

Funny thing is, in the height of day they don’t really stand out.

But while the curtains rustle over the windows and the fresh air makes everything feel clean and open, they sneak in.

They had to have organized and strategically slipped through the windows and doors, stealthily flying through undetected.

Come nightfall, when the windows were all closed and latched and the new air floated through the house, a low buzz started to grow and suddenly they were there — thousands of them.

Covering the ceiling, black dot after black dot blurred together to form cloud-like shapes.

The walls were dotted too, and anytime someone entered a room, their presence was announced by little buzzing black dots taking to the air as they passed by.

Downright Biblical — and an itsy bitsy clue that it’s fly season on the High Plains.

Maybe you’ve seen them in the garage when you leave it open for a couple hours, or heaven forbid you leave the car windows down, it can be days before a trip into town goes without swatting.

You might even be ashamed to compare notes with friends out of fear that something unknown to you has uniquely marked your home as a new third-world country.

However, you may rest assured, everyone is painfully aware of the flies, and are -— as trips to two different stores only to find empty shelves where the fly spray should have been revealed — fighting the good fight.

The copious amount of frogs earlier in the season should have been a hint that nature was about to ring the dinner bell, after which, of course, armies of beetles began swarming porches and walls in search of the fallen.

Just as all the wild things search for oasis in the flat, dry region, flies come part and parcel with the deal, hosting their own little baby boom in the places where food is plentiful.

As if it weren’t enough that they are always aggressively buzzing around and sullying the things we treasure — dinner, beverages, our sanity — scientists now tell us they have the upper hand.

Sure, they may have tiny brains, but with hundreds of thousands of nerve cells, they are wired to process more motion and perception information than the fastest computer does, and likely ever will.

In fact their little brains process things so fast everything around them is in slow motion (imagine incoming fly swatters as Matrix-style bullets crawling through the air).

We are, however, fortunate in the fact their circuitry moves too fast to allow for second thoughts, leaving them zooming right past the subtleties and, while the brain moves like lightning, it is their stomach that does the thinking.

And there is comfort in a universe that values justice, or at least shows a healthy sense of humor by building a super computer that routinely sticks itself to fly paper.

Sharna Johnson is a writer who is always searching for ponies. You can reach her at: [email protected] or on the web at: http://www.insearchofponies.blogspot.com