Les Mouches

One of the biggest drawbacks of country life is the profusion of vermin that find their way into one’s sphere. In summer, for example, just when the mice and squirrels have finally decided to check out and return to nature, the bugs arrive.

First came the termites, swarming in to feast on our rotting windowsills and porch. “I’m glad the termites left some wood for us,” said Henry when they were gone. Then came the ants, thousands of tiny sugar ants crawling all over our kitchen. They must have felt like they had found the Promised Land, here in the valley of lost Cheerios.

Our ants seem to like anything except vegetables (hmmm) and are especially partial to breastmilk. Every time I fix little Coco a bowl of rice cereal made with mama’s milk, I’m afraid to set it on the counter for fear that a line of little ants will dive right into it.

The ants seem to be moving on to greener pastures (I think I made them mad because I finally decided to put the sugar in some Tupperware), only to be replaced by the flies. We call them mouches around here (they’re somehow more tolerable en francais..). They have been worse than ever this year, mostly because our screen door is lying horizontal on a couple of sawhorses out on the porch. Christian pulled it off to replace the screen (several big holes!) but has since become distracted by more pressing issues. So there it sits, and without our first line of defense, we were at their mercy. Yesterday, they were driving me nuts--one brazen little bugger landed on my eyelid while I was pumping. They were circling poor little Coco as I fed her strained peas. I had to leave her in her high chair for a few minutes and told Henry his job was to keep the flies from landing on his sister. He held his own, I must say—swatting at them and hollering, “Va-t-en, mouche!”. That’s my boy…

For some time, we had convinced Henry that we actually had only one fly and that his name was Manny. It really did seem for months that there was only one fly about at any particular moment. But that charade is over, I’m afraid to say. There are simply too many to go on pretending. I’m embarrassed to note that we’ve had to resort to putting up fly strips. They’re hanging in all the kitchen windows like white trash Chinese lanterns. They seem to be pretty effective, though. I can actually sit here and type without Manny and his disruptive cousins crawling all over the computer screen.

And those are just the house bugs. We are bombarded by gnats every time we leave the house. And, of course, the ticks. We have plenty of the regular old Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever kind and I’ve found three deer ticks on Henry so far. He’s getting good at spotting them himself. Christian is uncharacteristically freaked out by the prospect of Lyme disease. So much so that he recently took it upon himself to give Henry a buzz with some twenty- year old clippers. The blades were shot and after hacking away at Hank's hair for a while, papa realized that a disaster was in the works and took our boy up to the bathroom where he shaved his poor little head with my Venus Divine razor. He looked like Kojak or a mini-Buddhist monk. Mama was in floods but have gotten used to it now, and it is in fact, growing out which is, thank goodness, the nature of hair…

I really shouldn’t complain since the fireflies make up for it all. They are glorious out here! Henry calls them Birthday Bugs, having noted their existence shortly after blowing out a birthday candle (on another kid’s birthday cake!). I remember rediscovering fireflies for the first time after moving back to Virginia from Paris. I was housesitting in another, far more elegant farmhouse outside of Waterford, ten years ago or so. It was the beginning of summer and I was sitting alone on the porch when I looked up and saw this amazing glowing stream of them at the treeline. I was so overjoyed I almost fell out of my chair. They no longer have that effect on me, but I still get a little tingle when I see one.