There were a couple of farmhouse summers that suffered from ant infestations. I wish I was exaggerating when I say infestations, but I assure you, I am not. If Mom was telling this story, she would remember the ants as only a minor inconvenience. But this time I am telling it.

The infestations lined the wooden countertops, skirted their way, in lines of hundreds maybe, thousands probably, around the coffee bar and fruit bowls with their characteristic one-third to two-thirds eaten bananas (Dad never can just eat a whole banana) and into the sink. Each morning before the morning can start the ants must be vacuumed up. This is just the way it is. I would say their corpses, but they might not even die in this procedure, so I will say their ant bodies fill up the vacuum bag and another day goes on and I ask Mom again why she won’t call an exterminator. She doesn’t want to deal with one, her usual refrain.

***

Now this, I hesitate to admit because it makes the situation seem dire, which it was not, but there was one summer, the summer that was the intermediary between home in Carpinteria and home in the Bay foothills, when I stopped for a night in the Bay house so that Dad could give me a ride to the airport in the morning. Dad made the forty-five minute drive to SFO a short thirty-five, not by speeding, it must have been through his shortcut-comprised routes, I can’t explain how it worked but it worked every time. Dad wasn’t at the house much himself those days, in the transition period, it sat, almost empty. This particular night I drive over late, after teaching in Berkeley, and fall asleep quickly in my old yellow bedroom, it feels dusty and unused, contrast from the college days when it was shared between me and a sister still at home. These days, it’s less lived in, but not so much as one might have hoped. I wake up the morning of my airport departure, my eyes coming into focus with the streaming sun just like the shot in a movie, my thoughts entering my awareness, and when my vision and my awareness collide with my sideways point of view on the pillow, I recoil at the pile of mouse droppings right there on the pillow next to me. I told you, it sounds dire, but somehow it was not, because the house had been too quiet, the dog food stored in the closet was a back-up now, and the mice had found it, and the lack of cats parading the grounds had left them to feast in quiet, and it all seemed predictable, while dismaying, this bit of decay. I expressed disgust to Dad who expressed equal disgust and promised to set a trap, his dealings with vermin was among the topics in his daily rundown with Mom. There was even a scorecard taped inside the kitchen cupboard, “Dad: 6” , “Ratones: 2”, to record his successes. I’m not sure how the Ratones’ success was qualified, but I hoped this was one. The efforts needed to be increased, a job for an exterminator you might suggest, but, as the scorecard suggested, Mom and Dad prefer their own measures. 

***

What is it about the familiarness we find, in our own peculiarities, that allows us to leave them, for the most part, unexamined. You might say that these peculiarities are full blown oddities, aberrations, but no matter the level of extremity you would like to apply, the point is, they become sub notes to settings, indistinguishable in daily happenings, and sometimes, turn into stories.

In Carpinteria, we stop noticing the lack of trim along the bathroom tile, we stop noticing the oven that takes an hour to preheat and can’t hold a temperature, we stop noticing the paint peeling off the front door that Mom refuses to replace because she loves the old glass, but we remind her that the lower panel is plastic because the glass cracked and it’s been years, now, but it hasn’t been replaced because the dogs like to push out the plastic panel and use it as a doggy door when we’re not home. We stop noticing, in the same way I put my ribbed white scoop neck in with my darks yesterday partly because I forgot I hadn’t separated my whites and partly because I thought I could get away with it, just once. Surely it will grey over time, surely I won’t notice a slow progression, until there is a new white tee to hold next to it.

***

This is what happened with the cockroaches, too. Well, they weren’t cockroaches, as it turns out they were Palmetto bugs, but the entomologist at work assured me that they are one and the same. This time, it was in my own apartment, it started in January, it might have started in December but I was used to it by January, there were one or two at a time, often hiding in the kitchen, at night, nothing could have screamed roaches more obviously, but the window in my kitchen was always open and I assured myself these were just the general “bug”, taking a break from winter on the other side of my glass panes. There were a few more, now and then, but increments of a few more is not a cause for alarm, not when it comes to bugs, at least, as I’m sure the entomologist could confirm.

We were living in a relative harmony, and when I say harmony I mean I used a paper towel nightly to crush any that lingered in the light. My nightly routine, no vacuum required. We might have continued this way until one weekend, my friend comes to stay and I find I must acknowledge the “bugs” lest she notice them and come to believe I am untidy. I find myself extra vigilant in the kitchen at night, before too many can be noticed by my guest, and when I find myself thinking in terms of too many, I acknowledge the scale of my problem. My guest doesn’t mind, or if she does, she does not comment, but my concern grows. The week after I am sitting across the couch from my neighbor, before she arrives I have discovered a “big bug” crawling up the side of my trash can, and now, for the first time in our shared kitchen, I feel repulsed. We drink tea and sparkling wine and are fixated on identifying a book as consuming as The Goldfinch but I feel fixated on the bugs too, so I ask her what to do about it. She advises me, smartly, to wait until morning and text our maintenance man, that he will call an exterminator, and if I were wiser I would have taken the advice. But though I’ve slept through many nights, months of nights, in fact, my perception of the “bugs” sharing my kitchen has been irrevocably altered and I cannot possibly fall asleep in comfort. I manically empty out the stack of paper grocery bags from under my sink, sure that this is where they are nesting, and at the thought of nesting I am on high alert and googling my kitchen’s symptoms. I read line after line on google that by the time I am seeing small roaches I am on the brink of a full scale infestation. I am no calmer but eventually I go to sleep and I do wake up in less of a panic, and ready to take action. I call the maintenance man, the maintenance man calls the exterminator. On Friday, I am at work, I have left a dozen sticky notes posted around my kitchen to indicate to the exterminator every spot where I have seen a bug emerge. I send him pictures for species identification, they are in the Hidden folder on my phone because I do not want to accidentally see one, I step into the soundproof meeting room when he calls to ask me about the sticky notes, he laughs, at my slight mania, I suppose, assures me they are coming in from my open window, that I seem like quite a clean person, and that he will lay bait to resolve the issue. Some sense of my dignity is restored, and I wonder, but only momentarily, why I haven’t called an exterminator sooner. I keep the window closed, diligently, he suggests I might stand by to keep watch while it’s open, but within a day or two, I’ve forgotten the bugs ever became roaches and my window stays open again.