Our Tiniest Roommates

Every year around mid-summer, our house gets kind of campy.  It's not so much that we're making s'mores all the time or cooking hot dogs on a stick.  It's more that there's just a lot of grass and bugs in the house.  The other night, Hubs had had it with the situation.  Walking into the living room with his snack, a moth fluttered into his hair, and he frantically scrubbed his head while taking the Lord's name in vain.  He sat down in a huff and declared definitively, "I know they aren't doing any harm, but there are too many bugs in this house and they need to be vacuumed up!"

A shocked silence hung in the air.  No bug dared move.  Amused by the specificity of his plan for their demise, I took inventory of the bugs among us who surely feared the Dyson at that moment.  A couple of moths hanging above us on the ceiling, a firefly clinging to the curtain, and a run of the mill housefly trying to creep away unassumingly along sill of the window.  The idea of exterminating these bugs via a vacuum hose gave me the giggles.

Now, if you've ever been in our living room, you know that we are surrounded by magazines at all times.  I love me a good dose of life-improvement advice.  I find that reading magazines full of health and home styling tips gives me an escape and distracts my mind from the weight of relentless stress that plagues most working mothers like me.  It does that by seamlessly replacing the stress of reality with the equally heavy but novel and exciting anxieties caused by knowing that you aren't doing a fraction of the shit you could be doing with your life.  Why should I dwell on my inefficiencies at work when I have never even attempted to complete a triathlon or make a patio lantern out of repurposed fountain drink lids?  I digress.

My point is, the most efficient of bug murder weapons was all around us, and Hubs' go to weapon was the vacuum.  Downright ridiculous.  Anyway, it was all bravado.  He didn't end up getting out the vacuum just then, because an atheletic competition of some sort was on the TV, which quickly lulled him into the complacent state known as "Sports Trance."   And I didn't pick up a magazine in arms against these creatures, because I try to avoid all violence in the tradition of Ghandi.  Adhering to one religion seems like a major commitment to me.  Rather, I like to pick and chose the best morsels from each faith, and this is one I like from Hinduism.  Plus, when I forget about trying to be like Ghandi and I do splat one dead, it is so unpleasant.  Little bodies smeared like grapes, full of tiny spurts of juice and legs.  Go-ross. 

Thus, in our house, it is live and let live most of the time.  Now the one exception is fruit flies.  Those little bastards are just irritating.  Their sense of entitlement in the fruit bowl is obnoxious.  What's most maddening about them is how blatantly they lounge around on my plums, not a care in the world as I hover near, because the second I bring my thumb near one, they are gone into the ether, lightning fast.

So I was complaining about this once to a friend of mine.  She had a tried and true solution.  Pour some apple cider vinegar in a bowl with a few drops of dish soap and set it out on the counter, she instructed.  The smell attracts the fruit flies.  They dive in and meet a soapy vinegary demise.  Simple.

So I tried it.  I filled a bowl with the death trap mixture and laid wait.  Two hours in, a cloud of tiny gray bodies hovered around the bowl, and a couple loitered on the rim, but no casualties.  By morning, there were a couple of small corpses bloating in the vinegar, but the party scene around the bowl had exploded.  Twenty flies at least sat perched just on the edge of the bowl as their more energetic friends, drunk on vinegar vapors, swarmed wildly about them.  Clearly, my extermination plan had morphed into an Irish wake.  Plus, the kitchen smelled like my daughter's feet after long day in sockless shoes.  (This may be something you don't know about Little D.  She's only 6, but she can bring the stink with those little trotters, which is why she has lovingly earned the nickname "Vinnie" in our house, short for "Vinegar Chips.")  Determined to end this party right now, I swiped harum scarum into the crowd, trying to catch these vagrants with a series of barehanded grabs.  When that didn't work, I tried to clap them dead in a nonrhythmic flurry of attacks.  I didn't get a one.  Defeated by my lack of success, and embarrassed by my violent outburst,  I dumped the vinegar down the sink in disgust.

Collecting myself, I rinsed the bowl clean, took a several deep breaths, put my plums in the fridge, and reflected for a moment upon Ghandi.