Charlie Slayton had just come home with Chinese take-out for his wife when I got him on the phone Wednesday evening. A few days earlier, Charlie, a high school classmate, had emailed a suggestion on how to rid a house of fleas.
“I was told that taking a walnut branch and dragging it through the house and yard will repel fleas,” wrote Charlie. “Something about walnuts they can’t stand.”
Several weeks ago I’d written about having a family of raccoons in the wall and removing them, but not the fleas they brought with them. We tried a battery of natural solutions, which were effective, though not immediately.
Finally, an exterminator provided the coup de grace, and the fleas are no longer with us.
Charlie can be a prankster, and this sounded preposterous — but then, so did a lot of the other homemade eradication schemes we tried (I think we did everything short of playing a Mozart sonata). In jest, I wrote back inviting him to come over and demonstrate.
Didn’t think more about it until a couple days ago when I came home and there were some branches and a large container that looked like a combination cooler/seat on the front porch.
When I got around to asking about the stuff on the front porch — in our neighborhood, it could have just been the leavings of a passer by — I was told someone named Charles came by and left walnuts and walnut branches.
So I called Charlie.
“My brother Wayne lived in Cuba, Alabama, once upon a time, about 20 years ago and had a house full of fleas,” Charlie said. “He called my mother and she said sweep the floor with walnut branches.
“He said it worked; he couldn’t believe it.”
Now Wayne lives on Nashville Ferry Road in a house that, as fate would have it, has walnut trees in the yard.
And that’s where Charlie went for branches for his classmate.
“All of us got ate up with seed ticks,” he said of the experience. “Little bitty buggers. They ankled all of us.
“I guess walnut doesn’t do anything for them,” Charlie said, speaking of the ticks.
“My wife said to me, ‘You ain’t fooling those ticks none, they know a dog when they see a dog.'”
A heck of a thing to say about a fellow who brings you Chinese food on a weeknight.
Randy Luker asked me about my honeybees the other day. He then showed me a photo on his phone and launched into a honeybee story like none I’ve heard.
On July 14, Luker had cataract surgery scheduled in Birmingham. When he came out of his house at 4 a.m., the day of the surgery, he was none too happy to discover a large clump of swarming bees attached to his Tahoe, the vehicle he was taking.
Figuring they would quickly blow off in the wind, Luker set out.
The bees were more tenacious than Luker anticipated. A few of them blew off, but the bulk of them hung on in a 70 miles-per-hour wind.
When Luker stopped at the Chevron station near the toll bridge in Tuscaloosa, about 90 percent of the bees were still on board.
After his surgery, Luker went through the drive-thru at a McDonalds across the street from St. Vincent’s Hospital. A security guard and at least one customer noticed something unusual.
“Hey hey, you’ve got bees on your car,” the guard yelled at Luker.
“Yeah, I know,” Luker replied. “They’re riding back to Columbus with us.”
And they did. Luker estimates he got back to Columbus with about 30 to 40 percent of the hive.
“I think we still had the queen ’cause they were clustered up around her,” he said.
Luker got a tree limb and raked the bees off his vehicle.
“We didn’t kill any of them,” he said. “We just dispersed them out between here and Alabama. I hope they are out there helping bees make honey.”
In last week’s column I mentioned a term my buddy Eddie Johnson uses, a Rosetta man, a reference to a fellow with a girl in every port, a “player,” in Eddie’s terminology.
Eddie didn’t know the origin of the word, nor could I find an explanation on the Internet.
Then one morning as I was standing on the street watering plants, a neighbor pulled up.
“You want to know the origin of Rosetta man?” she asked. “Used to be women’s underwear had rosettes embroidered on them. A Rosetta man is a guy who sees a lot of women’s underwear.”
Mystery solved.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 37 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.