Itchy arms and an ugly tree part of Prince George living

M

y arms look leprous and they are very itchy.

Back in May, after a considerable amount of begging from my children, we went to the May fair. It was an absolutely beautiful day after a wretched and wet spring season. We put on our shorts and tank tops, wore hats and put on sunscreen. The fair itself was fine: loud, expensive and exhausting.

But after we came home, strange blisters erupted on my forearms and they stayed on my body (itchy) for around a month. It was horrible. I played WebMD and I figured that either I had a horrific form of skin cancer or an inexplicable sunburn and thought that the blisters would eventually resolve themselves. And they did, eventually.

Then, a few weeks later, I applied the sunscreen again because it was the only bottle in the van. As it turned out, I am either allergic to the sun or allergic to the sunscreen I was using. The latter is more likely. I do not recommend the aerosol type of sunscreen because there is a high likelihood that the fine mist of sunscreen will coat only some of your body and it will largely behave as if you have sprayed cooking oil on your body. I was switched and am now using a creambased 60 SPF and no sunshine will ever hit my skin again.

And, I have thrown out the cooking oil spray.

Freshly armed (ha!) with sunscreen that works the way it is supposed to, I lathered up and headed outside to finally plant a little tree that my mother had so thoughtfully purchased for me.

Braving the wretched mosquitoes and demonic no-see-ums, I cut a perfect circle of grass out of the sod that we just laid because of the sewer mishap earlier this year. Thus digging the hole, wrestling the root-bound tree out of the black plastic pot, and back-filling the soil around the terribly dry roots, I successfully planted my first tree.

I even manhandled the sod back in place around the trunk and it (mostly) looks natural.

This tree was a gift because I intended to commit justifiable homicide on a hideous tree in our backyard. It is some sort of ornamental tree and it is awful. From the time that we have moved into our house, this tree has had issues. It is lopsided with funky, awkward branches that slap you in the face any time you try to mow around it. It was also planted in a stupid spot. I was determined to kill the tree, or dig it up while it was still small enough to move it. But, I didn’t and now it is too big to move.

The first year I was going to kill it, the tree blossomed with beautiful white flowers and it was too beautiful to kill. For two years afterwards however, the tree was on death row while I was waiting for the flowers to come back. They did not.

Last year, I had had enough and the tree was going to go the way of the dodo, except there was a bird’s nest in the tree and I couldn’t possibly kill a home to sweet little birdies. So I got a new tree instead and I was thinking about fashioning a MacGyver rig around the funky branches to straighten them into a more pleasing shape.

Approximately 13 minutes after I planted my new tree, the thunderstorm of the century ravaged the new and the old tree and they will probably bare marks of the disaster for a long time.

I guess they are both here to stay, oddly shaped or not and I will just have to live with them.

The price for living in a great city is taking the ugly with beautiful and dealing with the mosquitoes, too.