It was a beautiful early autumn day in our suburban corner of the Northern Virginia woods. And instead of spending the afternoon at the playground with my children, I sat on our back deck sterilizing vacuum cleaners.
Now, I’ve always made an effort to keep my vacuum cleaners in good condition since I finally figured out that they don’t work if the hoses are clogged with debris. But I’ve never pulled out actual cleaning products for the task before.
This time? It was necessary.
Maybe I should back up a bit. Because there’s a string of events that brought me this state of affairs.
When I said that we live in the Northern Virginia woods, I wasn’t kidding. Our particular suburb was built with a mid-century aesthetic for merging community and nature. Before the ’80s bulldozers started clearing hundreds of thousands of acres to build shiny new developments dotted with far more conveniently placed saplings, tree hugging builders planned our neighborhoods with their miles of walking trails through towering trees.
Having grown up in the city, I never really cultivated an appreciation for the great outdoors. But my financially driven exile to the burbs has forced me to admit that I live in a super pretty place.
It takes me minutes to drive to great shopping and fine dining, but it only takes seconds to step into sun dappled paths under canopies of green or – depending on the season – gold. I walked off all of my baby weight after the twins were born, pushing our double stroller up and down the hills of those paths. And as I breathed in the fresh air of my early morning jaunts, I knew that I had taken just one more step away from being “a city person.”
So I do like it here. I’m not saying that I’d never move back into DC… But for now, this suits us. And the lovely surroundings play a significant role in that for me.
Unfortunately – living in the super pretty woods has its price. And that would be bugs.
When we lived in the city, we battled cockroaches and ants. But out here in the wild west of DC area insects, there are far more “critters” with which to contend. The mosquitoes are fierce, all breeds of beetles and water bugs find their way into our homes, and the ants are literally unstoppable. Even with all the exterminators, traps and sprays, they still make their seasonal appearance like clockwork (“Thank you ladies and gentlemen! We’ll be here all summer.”)
Bugs are old hat to me now. I kill them when I can and ignore them when I can’t. And I leave the spiders alone since I like to think they help my cause (which is making the flying things disappear).
As a quick aside, I have to admit that for all of my aversion to things that “skitter,” the garden variety house spider doesn’t bother me. I think this has something to do with Charlotte’s Web. Not that I expect them to call out a cheery “Salutations!” to me or to spin self affirming messages through webs or anything… But for me, the beloved children’s book character has given an otherwise scary little creature the semblance of gentle benevolence.
But back to the nasty bugs that plague my very existence…they’re driving me nuts. I know it’s just a warm weather thing, and that the cooling temperatures then further encourage them to emigrate from their outdoor homes into our better insulated ones. But nonetheless, it’s annoying.
This year has been different though. A new player has entered the scene. For the past week or two, I’ve noticed little gnat-like bugs that seem to appear whenever food and drink are present. There aren’t many of them, but even the few that flit about make me swat and swear at them like the mosquitoes that previously held their place of loathing in my heart.
I really hate them. They surprise me when I turn on the lights in the kitchen – sometimes in a creepy way that all too often makes me I feel like I’m wandering through a scene from True Blood or The Believers. Like if I decided to climb up into our crawl space I’d find a candle lit alter of chicken bones and human hair.
I told Chris that I didn’t think these little fruit fly-like things were normal, even for our woodsy location. But he seemed to find my rantings about feeling like I’m living in a third world village to be extreme – which made any stray ideas about exorcists or voodoo witch doctors seem a bit over the top.
He didn’t even think that an exterminator was necessary. Something about pouring bleach down the drains first…I don’t know. He said he thought we could fix it. Because, you know – we’re SO handy around the house.
So I let it go. And I battled the bugs on my own time in my own flailing way. But then I found the source.
That happened today. It was quite possibly one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever witnessed in my own home. And I once had three children potty training at the same time, so that’s saying a lot.
When Oliver arrived home from school today, the twins were still napping and I thought, GREAT – a rare opportunity to give my undivided attention to the oldest and currently “easiest” child. When his siblings are awake and whining, he often wanders off to do his own thing and there will be long stretches of time where I’m not entirely sure where he is. Sometimes he’s in another room destroying something or unrolling every roll of toilet paper in the house…but usually, he’s being a lamb and quietly playing with Thomas trains. So of course I was happy to have a little time to focus on him.
But when we sat down on the basement rug, I noticed some crumbs from someone’s granola bar and a number of ants surrounding them (nothing unusual – I did mention the ants didn’t I?) So I said, “ew, gross -let’s clean this up. I’ll get the vacuum.”
I actually have two vacuums, but one was in a storage space on that floor, so that’s the one I grabbed. Up until a few days before, that same vacuum had been sitting in the room adjacent to our kitchen on the first floor. I used it daily to clean the area around the kids’ table, but at some point I must have moved it downstairs.
Just like any other day, I unlocked the hose so I could snap on the brush attachment. But unlike any other day, the end of the hose was not the only thing to emerge. I stood there in open mouthed horror as I watched tiny bugs crawl, fly…SWARM out of my vacuum cleaner.
This is where my talent for dissociation comes in very handy. I’m awesome in emergency situations – I literally shut down all emotions. Sure, on the fringes I’m screaming and tearing my hair out in clumps, but you’d never know it. I stay calm, assess the situation and take practical measures to problem solve. In short, I psychologically flee, leaving my intellect to clean up the mess.
In this case, I was so repulsed that I did spit out a mantra of “ohmygodohmygodohmygod” as I dragged the vacuum cleaner outside. Because it was just that bad. If I thought the few mini flies buzzing around at all times flashed shades of bayou voodoo, the writhing infestation that had been hatching in my vacuum cleaner, IN MY HOUSE for who knows how long was like something straight out of The Omen.
Luckily, the bugs were small, so Oliver, distracted by TV couldn’t see what I was freaking out about outside the window. He only caught glimpses of me running in and out of the house with bottles of ammonia. He heard my shuddering gasps while I power sprayed the bag-less vacuum parts with the garden hose and saw all of the eggs clinging to the cylinder walls. There may have been tears – but I hid them from my unsuspecting boy.
Just to be on the safe side, I also disassembled the second vacuum and fumigated that one as well.
You may be wondering why I didn’t just throw away the first vacuum (which we will hereafter refer to as “the host“). And ten years ago, I absolutely would! But I’m older and poorer now, and I’ve tinkered enough with the damn machine to feel fairly confident in my total hive annihilation.
Where do we go from here? Chris thinks we should give it a few days and look into some over the counter (or whatever you call the non-professional stuff) products.
Where did they come from to begin with? I have NO idea. Maybe something flew in from outside and decided to nest in my vacuum cleaner. Maybe I vacuumed up something that was the source. Or maybe it was something completely unrelated to the beautiful nature in our backyard.
Sometimes you’re practical and drag your vacuum cleaner outside with a bottle of ammonia. And sometimes you look for far more sinister agents in the world. Sometimes you think that you have a freak infestation of indigenous bugs. And sometimes you know it’s something less random – something tied up with karma, fate, revenge…
In the end, my practicality wins out and I assume it’s just another “living in the woods” thing. But my years of TV and movie viewing has instilled just a little suspension of disbelief. In the light of day, I think I need to do a better job monitoring the tiny creatures that wander into my house. But now and again, a small superstitious part of me wonders if we just “got da bad juju…”
