After weeks of waiting and speculation, it finally happens: the wild black raspberries are in. Plump ripe berries dot the landscape from St. Peters Church Road all the way down to Shermans Creek.

We ready the kitchen for jam-making, and Shana suits up to go picking. Despite the ferocious heat, she wears a heavy denim shirt to protect her arms from thorns; long pants to shield her legs from the poison ivy that grows so copiously around the berry bushes; and hiking boots for sure footing on the steep, slippery ground. It’s bathing suit weather, but to look at her, you’d think she was getting ready for a brisk November hike.

She returns hours later, face glistening, hair plastered down with sweat, hands dyed purple. “There were tons of them in that patch above the big pond, right by the sumacs. It was a complete jungle.” She shows me her prize, a plastic mixing bowl brimming with raspberries, setting it down on the butcher block with an unmistakable air of triumph. Then she tells me it’s time for a shower.

After a cooling off period, we start to make jam. As Ella Fitzgerald scats joyfully in the background, we ready the jars, wash the berries, measure out the sugar. A natural division of labor occurs. We don’t really have to talk about what we’re doing while we work. She handles the fruit; I pre-warm the jars. She cooks up the berries, sugar, and pectin; I ready the jarring station and work with the molten jam. She caps; I process.

It’s hot work, but there’s great satisfaction at the end of it. We step back and admire the unlabeled jars in their neat rows. The metal lids flex as they cool, signaling the successful formation of a vacuum, a sound a little like the popping of tab on a cold can of beer.

Actually, a glass of wine is more our speed, sipped under an air conditioning vent while a Netflix movie unspools at the end of a long, productive day. A day of jam-making promises a good night’s sleep.

Usually.

This year, Shana woke up in the wee hours clawing at her flesh. Her body was on fire with itching. Morning light revealed angry red swaths of insect bites on her thighs, back, and behind her knees. The moment I saw them, I knew what we were dealing with.

Chiggers.

Chigger bites, considered to be among the itchiest to afflict human beings, are the result of the harvester being harvested herself — in this case, for the tasty protein in her skin cells. The microscopic creatures behind this maddening enzymatic fracking are actually the larvae of Trombicula Alfreddugensi, a species of mite named for an obscure 19th century Mexican herpetologist of French descent.

But I digress.

The life cycle of this mite proceeds in the usual fashion: from egg, to larva, to nymph, to adult. The adult is the only one readily visible to the human eye, and even that little red critter would elude middle-aged eyes like ours. The larvae, on the other hand, are really, really small, on the order of two fingerprint ridges.

The larvae are what concern us here. In the moist heat of early summer, they congregate in tall grass, and especially around berry bushes, waiting patiently for a creature to come walking, hopping, or slithering by. Then — sproing! — they make a leap for it.

The untucked cuffs of a pair of pants make an ideal doorway to the feast. These mites are pretty spritely. They can migrate from ankle to groin — one of their favorite feasting grounds — in less than fifteen minutes, searching out places where the skin is unusually tender, moist, and wrinkled. Flesh that has been compressed by elastic is ideal, which is why their bites are often concentrated above socks and waistbands.

Common lore has it that chiggers bore into your flesh, but this is a myth. Their mouth parts are poorly suited for boring. In fact, their wimpy little jaws can barely pierce human flesh at all, which is why they use the infinitely more revolting tactic of spitting on their food before they consume it. Their saliva contains enzymes that dissolve cells on contact. The chigger then slurps up the delicious cell slurry.

One of the other horrifying facets of a chigger’s meal is that the skin cells harden into a kind of tube that facilitates the slurping. This tube, which is called a stylostome, is the primary source of the torturous itching that accompanies their bite.

So how do you deal with these little monsters? Tucking your pants into your socks isn’t a bad start. Bug repellent is a good idea. Showering immediately after coming in from a romp in the grass is wise, although by then it might be too late. Washing your expeditionary clothes in hot water is recommended.

But if you’ve already become a holiday meal for chiggers, there’s not much to do but slather the bites with itch cream, and maybe take some Benedryl, if that stuff works for you. Anything you may have read about covering the welts with nail polish is hogwash. If you’ve taken a shower, the chigger is long gone, its meal a happy memory.

Or an insatiable misery, depending on your point of view.