Pumpjacks, Purple Pigs…and Chiggers

If you can guess where we were this weekend based on the title of this post, good on ya, friend. You are either quite adept at inductive reasoning, or you have experienced all of these things first-hand. (And let’s be honest, between reason and experience, experience is usually way more fun.

Except that I don’t know what it means to “experience” a pumpjack. I mean, all I did was look at them. That’s all. Don’t go getting any harebrained ideas about climbing astride no pumpjacks, fools.) (Yes, that’s a parenthetical phrase split between two paragraphs. Because I can.)

We spent the weekend in the gloriously piney woods of east Texas with dear friends and their young’un, Little Miss. From Friday through Sunday we traipsed between Henderson, Chapel Hill, White Oak and Tyler soaking up the trees, sunshine and barbecue.

First order of business: introduce Little Miss to ribs. (Having recently graduated to Cheerios and yogurt melts, we wagered it was reasonably safe to introduce some ribby goodness.) To accomplish this most sacred Texan rite, we embarked to the Purple Pig Café outside Tyler where we all commenced to imbibe in the meat parade in which joints like the Purple Pig specialize.

Next up: Chapel Hill where we lounged and (one of us) fished from a homemade barge on Horseshoe Lake. Good thing we weren’t fishing for dinner. After nearly an hour without a bite, we decamped for Tyler to catch “Man of Steel”* and frozen custard at Andy’s.

Maybe we should have been more patient when it came to fishing, but we all agreed that frozen custard for dinner ranks somewhere between getting a paid day off on your birthday and having Little Miss sleep until 10:00 a.m.

On Sunday we adventured around a recently acquired (and almost wholly undeveloped) piece of land dotted with the aforementioned pumpjacks. To our credit, we were smart enough to trade our shorts and sandals for jeans and boots to protect against the Johnson grass, snakey critters and chiggers. The more I tramped down the roughshod paths, the sun blotted by trees and creeper vines, the more I thought of slipping into Narnia or that island from Lord of the Flies. It was great fun.

Soon enough the heat drove us back to the air-conditioned truck, and we were then on our way home. With the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s number of chiggers in tow. Seriously, they must have been ninja chiggers because I don’t know how they got around boots, jeans and undergarments.

Gah, they’re like sneaky, “sleeper” bugs. They don’t start itching immediately. They get going once you’re comfortably back home or having lunch at Chick-fil-A, and you absolutely cannot scratch that itch without alarming, offending or disgusting those around you. So I’ll leave you with that…after I pry the anti-itch spray away from Mr. Man. Damn chiggers.

*OMG, Henry Cavill, will you be my cabana boy? Whoa. Forget Amy “I have bouncy hair” Whatshername. She’ll never lust you like I lust you.