This Side of the Pond

A couple of weeks ago, I confessed to discovering that one of my parents is a secret smuggler of box knives. It was a shock, but I was still able to labor under the impression that my dad was the only dangerous individual in my immediate family.

Unfortunately, I have since had to reckon with my own naivety.

My mum, as it turns out, is the more cunning of the pair. She did not attempt to bring contraband with her to Wyoming; rather, she waited patiently until she got here and played the long game before she declared war, making sure she could get the weapon cache she needed without raising suspicion.

You have no doubt noticed that the air has been thicker than usual with insects this season. Flies, moths, gnats, wasps – if it has wings, you’ll find it hovering around the cabin at the bottom of our yard where my parents are spending their vacation.

They seemed more attracted to the cabin than anywhere else on the property, though not for any obvious reason. As far as we could tell, there was nothing in the area that would be dramatically attractive to a fly.

At first, my parents liked to have the door and windows open while they were spending time in the cabin. We hadn’t gotten around to installing an AC unit for them because the temperatures weren’t nearly warm enough for it to be necessary – a lot of the time, they were still using a space heater in the evenings.

We figured that opening the windows was sufficient to keep the temperature stable in the meantime, and each of those had already been upgraded with a sturdy screen to keep the insects out.

The door was the problem. They really enjoyed opening it during the day to let a little of the outside in, though they claim the intent was to attract a breeze, rather than small visitors.

Consequently, by the time my parents had fully recovered from their jet lag, they were sharing space with half the county’s allotment of bugs.

In hindsight, I can’t help but think all of this was planned. My mother woke up and chose violence one morning, and the local pests were her target.

She began mentioning the need for some sort of insect control, which did seem fair. The theme tune of the cabin by this point was a low but persistent buzzing and we were all growing used to being dive-bombed.

Not one to half-complete a task, my husband fetched her an arsenal. He plugged in an ultra-violent light to snare the smaller infiltrators and handed her two fly swats and a can of bug spray.

We assumed she would divide her attention between these tools, utilizing each of them equally to build her insect defense. We were wrong.

We’re told the UV light was too bright at night and that’s why it got unplugged. We’re told the flies are too fast to catch with the swat because they never seem to want to land.

What my mother has not yet been willing to confess is that she just really likes spraying things with a can.

The next day, we made our way to the cabin to fetch my parents to take them on a trip to town. As we entered, we were hit full in the face by the odor of fly spray.

Inside was a cloud of insect repellant so thick it was almost visible. My parents looked a little gray, but insisted they couldn’t smell anything.

This was because my mum had been spraying flies so voraciously since she woke up that their noses had simply given up.

A quick inspection of the cabin revealed the scale of the damage. The floor was sticky around the edges and slippery in the middle. One pane of the door was saturated with a full layer of liquid. The windows were suspiciously wet.

Tacky round spots of spray were even visible on the screens the other side of the picture window. It’s not as though anything could get through them, but it would seem that my mum was no longer content with wiping out every fly and wasp that had made its way indoors so anything within a ten-yard radius was now on her radar.

The floor was littered with the corpses of what I would humbly estimate to be a few thousand tiny creatures.

The door, I should note, was still open.

This despite the fact that the AC was now operational. The excuse we were given was that my parents enjoy the fresh air and you can’t get that from an air conditioning unit, but I think we all know the truth.

The insect problem seemed under control after this first massacre, but my mum insisted she’d seen some hiding in the corners. If they had taken a break from flying around, I can tell you from experience that it’s because their eyes had been watering for hours.

We aired out the cabin and quietly suggested that she might want to be more circumspect about the sheer volume of repellant being released into the air, even though my husband had deliberately chosen a kind that’s meant to be safe for animals and children. We pointed out that there must surely be a tolerance limit even for adults.

It didn’t help – over the next few days, at the first hint of a buzz, out came the spray can. The insects were still sending scout teams to look for a new infiltration point, but that first battle had been definitive and they now lacked both the numbers and the will to mount a true offensive.

I will give my mother this: you won’t find a single live insect in that cabin today. The bugs have acknowledged her as their greatest ever nemesis and long since left for pastures less deadly.

We never did convince her to stop spraying things. What ultimately brought a halt to the war was not common sense or any sort of truce; nope, it’s the fact that the spray can ran out.

I’m a little worried what might happen if the flies find out.