Musings 157--Meandering through the yellow jackets

The Bush Administration is kind of like me meandering through the yellow jackets.

Monday was a typical hot summer day in southern Ohio. Temperatures in the morning were in the high 80's. By noontime, the temperatures would be in the mid 90's. Ah, yes winter seemed far away.

I have about four miles of wilderness roads that criss-cross the 240 acres of The Farm. Some roads cross meadows, some of them wind through hay fields and some run through large wooded areas.

I jumped on my trusty Massey-Ferguson tractor, hooked up the brush hog, loaded up my gun, grabbed a set of limb pruners, got a bottle of cold water and headed out to chop down the tall weeds and brush that tend to creep in on my roads. I trundled up to what we call the old Rowe Place (because there used to be a family by the name of Rowe that lived there long ago) made a couple of rounds on the top of the hill and drove down the road to the area my father calls The Dump. I ran into my first yellow jackets nest embedded at the foot of an old pine tree. I saw them before they saw me, so I gave them a wide berth and went merrily on my way. I decided to mow down the cow pasture that leads around the hill. On my fourth round, I got stung by a pissed off yellow jacket that took offense at me running over his nest--twice.

Yellow jackets are bees that build their houses in the ground. When you run over them with a lawn mower or a tractor they immediately swarm up to see what is going on. When I made my next round after stirring them up, they got me. It hurts like the fires from hell, but it soon dissipates.

Rubbing my belly, I decided to journey onward. Heading back toward the area called the Old Spring, I decided to hang a left after going down the hill and cross the shallow creek. The meadow on the other side needed to be mowed. I set about doing this. One the fourth round, I got stung between the eyes by another yellow jacket that I had disturbed on my previous round.

Now rubbing my belly and the notch between my eyes--luckily I did not swell much--I continued mowing around the road. About a quarter mile around the hill there is a road that goes straight down the hill and connects to another road further down in the valley. I had sawed up a tree that had fallen over that road during the winter, and no one had traveled on it since. I decided to open it up by mowing down the weeds and pruning the branches. Once in the valley, I decided to turn and go back up the hill to widen the road a bit. There was a yellow jackets nest in the center of the road about 50 feet from the top of the hill. They were waiting for me. I got stung a couple of times on the back before speeding back around the hill, crossing the creek and continuing on to the the Old Spring. (The Old Spring is just that. A spring of cold water that never runs dry.) There is a small meadow before the Old Spring. I decided to mow it down. On round number five I got stung on the neck and back by the local yellow jackets, who did not want my tractor driving over them.

It was getting on toward late afternoon, and I finally understood the handwriting on the wall. The yellow jackets wanted me to go home and quit bothering them. They didn't sting me on the first pass, but they were waiting on the second. I had been stung enough.

Bush jr. has taken the U. S. into the yellow jacket's nest of the middle east. We've been fumbling around in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we stay there too long, we will get stung more times than we can stand. Sometimes is is better to limp home and stay in the air-conditioned comfort of our own borders. Unfortunately, it is a lesson that both I and Bush jr. have to learn over and over again. The only difference is that I just forgot that the yellow jackets are making their nests in the hot weather of July.

Bush jr. has six years of experience to pull from, but he isn't learning much from it. He keeps doing the same things over and over. Stupid people just keep doing stupid things. I guess he hasn't been stung enough, yet.