Mummified Sky Raisins

Mystified? I didn’t know what a sky raisin was until my daughter Anna Prinkey stopped by my house with her dog Rocky. One hundred sixty pounds of muscle and teeth, Rocky is a German Shepherd Husky mix and highly protective of my daughter. God help the person that would dare try to harm her while he’s around. Even though he tolerates me, he still will snarl and snap if I make any untoward fast movements towards her.

Let me backtrack to say that this autumn, I have had a lighter than usual incursion of stink bugs, only three, about five of the fake lady bugs, two yellow jackets, and one wasp seeking their winter vacation home inside of my house. Where they come from I have no idea, but every fall they seem to make the annual pilgrimage.

The anomaly to the invading insects was the unprecedented number of house flies that have sought a sanctuary from the cold. Their presence has been just short of the biblical plague that God inflicted on Egypt. I soon got tired of chasing and swatting them, so I hung two of the sticky fly traps from the ceiling near the window where they seemed to congregate. So far, there must be sixty or so of the winged creatures stuck to those dangling amber curls. I’ve still been busy using the flyswatter to lessen their numbers and I have “downed pilots” in many places on the floor and furniture tops. They’re dead, dried, and have mummified waiting for me to sweep, vacuum, and dust them away into the trash. I find their dehydrated bodies are randomly scattered throughout my living room.

Back to Anna’s dog Rocky. He likes to catch and eat the flies that are still alive. As he ate one that had fallen to the floor and was crawling across the carpet, Anna said that Rocky likes to catch “sky raisins” and eat them. I thought, “What is a sky raisin?” Then she explained when Rocky catches a fly out of the air, she calls them “sky raisins.”

My cat Willow also likes to eat living flies that she’s able to catch as an occasional one falls to the floor. She will bat them with her paws and play with her food before she finally decides to consume them. She won’t touch the dried ones, mummified sky raisins are not on her menu.