An Oklahoma Style Birthday Surprise

Last year I complained a lot about summer and this blog post will be pretty much the same, but for different reasons. 

My first summer here in Oklahoma (last year), was — the locals said — a one-off freak hot summer. Well under this logic, this has been a two off freak hot summer. 

As with last summer, I have largely stayed indoors. I write full-time so I am very happy to be able to stay home in the air conditioning, and up until about six weeks ago, I was walking twice a day. I had to stop as it was just too hot. I pushed through for a while, but ended up feeling unwell from the heat, so I gave it up. Every outing has to be carefully considered in this weather. Shall I take out the trash or can I put up with the smell until winter? Do we really need to go out for groceries or can I order online again? Will I make it through to winter if I don’t actually get any natural light at all? All of those considerations.

It has been so hot that our balcony door is swollen shut and I don’t think it will be operational again until mid-winter. All this to say that when I do leave the apartment, it’s for a good reason. But it gets worse. 

It was recently my birthday. Not only was it excruciatingly hot, but I was on the tail end of a pretty awful bout of covid. Covid has a way of making you feel particularly deathly when you wake up in the morning — bad headache, severe congestion, hacking cough, no taste or smell. I’m sure you get the idea. 

I woke up early and it was still quite dark. I didn’t bother switching the lights on, and instead, fumbled around with the coffee machine in the dark. After getting the coffee machine going, I switched the kitchen light on, and noticed a strange looking thing on the kitchen floor by my bare feet. It was brown, and resembled a crumpled up piece of paper. I squatted down next to it and poked it with my finger — remember, I’d just woken up and was feeling unwell. The brown thing moved; in fact, it unfurled itself and stretched out. There was no mistaking it — it was not a crumpled up piece of brown paper. It was a scorpion, and it was right next to my bare feet. 

I can tell you that I was instantly awake. I grabbed a hand weight which was near me, and squashed the little beast good and proper. It took two heavy blows to kill it. 

I’m from Australia. I’m used to seeing spiders and bugs, but I’m not used to seeing scorpions, especially on the kitchen floor. I did not like it at all. And my leg is still scarred from the Brown Recluse spider bite from January this year which left a huge infected ulcer that took months and a course of antibiotics to heal. The memory is too fresh to see a scorpion in the same year.

I later found out that scorpions will often come indoors to escape the heat, or intense cold. So now I feel nervous about summer AND winter. Isn’t it enough that Oklahoma is hot, flat, has terrible air quality, and is landlocked? Apparently not. It also has scorpions which come inside on your birthday when you have covid. 

America perplexes me. I don’t understand how people survive here. The weather can be so extreme and there’s so much that can kill you. People think Australia is deadly but I’d argue that America is deadlier. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, rabies, bears, wolves, mountain lions, freaks on the motorways — the list goes on. I can understand why so many people have guns. I want one for the next time I see a scorpion.