A sure sign of summer is the first poison ivy rash of the year. I hate it. I’m convinced that the slightest encounter with the plant will result in me contracting a rash from it. I’m convinced the wind takes over sometimes and blows the oil from the plant onto my skin. I know others feel the same.

Editor Hank Will told me his dad was so allergic to the oils in the plant that if he drove by it with his arm out the window of his truck, he'd get it. The stuff can fly.

I’ve had the allergy since I as a boy, so I’m pretty adept at identification. When in the woods, I keep my eyes peeled and do everything possible to avoid it, only to develop an itch and a rash days later.

It was Monday of last week – two days after we’d found the morel mushrooms at my mom’s – when I started to itch and experience the familiar symptoms. By Saturday, it was still lingering on my arms, but I felt like it was fading fast. I wasn’t scratching it in my sleep, and the rash was getting smaller.

Then Saturday afternoon I went for a hike, 2 ½ miles one way, back through the Clinton Lake trails to get to a fishing hole. The trail is beautiful (I was after crappie, but if you want to fish in noncontiguous Lake Henry for trout, buy a trout permit before you go).

As you can see in the pictures, the trail is pretty clear, so I shouldn’t have been brushing up against poison ivy while walking on the trail. However, I was hunting morels and probably wasn’t as attentive to green foliage as I should have been the entire time. So, as I type this, the poison ivy rash on my right forearm is oozing, which means it may spread. Back to square one.

Still, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was great to get out in the woods for a long hike, feel the spring air, work up a sweat, stop to fish and reluctantly hike back to the paved world.

For identification purposes, my brother Andy likes to say, “Leaves of three, let it be.”

And no, I caught no crappie, just a perch and a rash. But it was still fulfilling.

Is there anything that makes you dread spring and summer, and, more importantly, how do you overcome or subdue those things in order to get out and do the things you love to do?

One of the things I live for is weekends when I can throw the fishing poles in the Blazer, load up my dog, and leave the city and work behind for a weekend to visit my family down south. As it turned out this last weekend, I wouldn’t need the fishing poles, but we did manage to get out into the woods and find some morel mushrooms.

Arriving at my mom’s – an hour and a half south of my home in Lawrence, Kansas – Saturday around noon, I knew the forecast called for rain. Also, it had been raining for a few days there, so I knew getting back into pastures where the ponds are was out of the question. Sitting on the couch watching baseball, someone suggested morel mushroom hunting.

Mom and I had talked in the days leading up to my visit about how it was morel season, so I think it was in the back of our minds all along.

As I’ve mentioned previously in blog posts, my mom – and all the people I know who hunt morels, really – is very protective of her spots. They’re hard to come by, so when you find a good one that produces every year, you’d like it to be a well-kept secret, like a favorite restaurant that has a certain pie on a certain day and you don’t want to tell your friends for fear they’ll start showing up and wiping out the supply.

Driving into her first spot, one of her honey-holes, the main thing she was worried about was leaving tracks in a very soft field. After driving back about a half-mile or so along a hedgerow, she said simply, “Okay, anytime,” to my brother, Andy, and he stopped and killed the engine.

Seemingly five second later, she spotted a big brownish-orange morel from her passenger seat. We would later regret that this initial excitement led us to plunge into the forest without applying insect repellent.

We collected about 20 morel mushrooms from that first hole and that – while it was all we would find the rest of the day Saturday and the short time we spent hunting Sunday – was enough to fill two skillets.

The highlights, at least for me, were twofold: listening to the rushed tone and giggles in my mom’s voice as she told stories of hunting morels with her late boyfriend, and listening to her theories and experiences with finding where the almighty morel grows. After all, she’s been hunting morels since before I was born.

As an aside, our perseverance to one spot about 15 miles from Mom’s house led me to a chance encounter with a badger, an animal I’d never seen in person.

By the end of the day, as dusk was fast approaching, Andy’s weary back led him to stay at Mom’s while we – Gwendolyn Marie, mom and I – checked what would be a fruitless spot that my mom had had good luck at in years past.

As it got to where you could barely see, the women remained seated in the front of the truck while I bird-dogged (rode along and got out when the women, my mom mainly, saw a spot that they thought looked good).

I was approaching one such spot when I saw a hole in the ground roughly the size of a basketball. Seeing a creature appear with white on the face, I immediately called out, “Skunk!” but then froze.

I was processing Mom’s warning, something about “you’re going to freeze riding in the back of the truck on the way home,” when I saw the little critter stick his head out, and I realized it was no skunk.

Calling to Gwen for a camera, I tried to see if there was any danger or any warning of attack. I took a small step toward the hole, and the head would disappear only to reappear a few seconds later.

Gwen came with the camera, slowly and quietly making her way up the bank to where I was. At this point it did cross my mind that what we were doing was dangerous – we  were about 5 to 8 yards from the den – and since I had involved Gwen, running was now out of the picture, and I’d have to probably boot this thing if it came charging.

My guess is that it was neither a protective sow with cubs nor an ill-tempered boar, because it just hung its head out of the den and watched while Gwen snapped this picture, which I’m thankful to have. It confirms something that I did not know previously; Kansas is, indeed, badger country.

According to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, the Great Plains are primarily where badgers are found in North America. They reside north through the central western Canadian provinces, throughout the western United States, and south throughout the mountainous areas of Mexico. But their range has expanded east since the turn of the 20^th century to as far as Ontario, Canada.

“It’s a …”

I received this text message from my brother, Josh, earlier today while I was at work and he was either sitting in, or just leaving, a doctors’ office. A minute later, his next response came, “Girl.” My brother and his wife, Nikki, will welcome a little baby girl into their family in August, God willing, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Sometimes in life, we’re hit with one of those moments that make you take a step back and go, “This is going by fast.” Usually, it’s holidays and birthdays and dates that make us remember loved ones that have passed on. In this case, it’s a great feeling to be getting older.

And it felt even better to get the next message from Josh, saying, “It looked really healthy.”

There are many things that I’m looking forward to doing with my niece and her Daddy: watching football, grilling out, hunting and fishing … it turns out I don’t do a lot of the things little girls do, but you know what?! I’ll give anything a try to earn the affection of this particular little girl.

And she just might have a little tomboy in her. (Though knowing Nikki, I wouldn't count on her noodling for catfish.) After all, her dad came from a family of four boys and one girl – our mom – so I think Dad’s in about the same situation as me. We don’t know what, exactly, little girls are like.

I’ve never seen anything wrong with little girls being tomboys. My girlfriend’s siblings include her two sisters and no boys, so her dad raised her to hunt and fish. That turned out to be pretty cool for me because she understands and appreciates what I love to do.

It wouldn’t be a good thing, though, if she were better at my hobbies than me.

But I digress …

I know there’s the typical answer of playing with dolls, but for all the women out there, or for the fathers who have daughters, can I get some help? What do little girls do?

In the meantime, I’ll be thinking and praying about the health of that little, hope-she-doesn’t-look-like-her-dad, girl.