The Year of the Moths

It began, as portentous events more often do, not as some black-versus-white, heavens-splitting–in-a-beam-of-light, voice-of-god defining moment, but in a distinctly unmemorable, not even a whimper, fluttering. Odd. Barely capturing my attention; then it was gone. Forgotten.

Till the next time, which came very soon after, eliciting a vague, preoccupied “how did that get in?” thought. And the next, and the next, until my consciousness finally flared alive and realized, as with grasshoppers or locusts, I might have a problem. Little moths, suddenly it then seemed, were everywhere. Remembering an infestation of meal moths years before, a couple of good garments riddled with holes, and having no idea what these newcomers were up to, I strove to perfect the hand-clap execution sans mercy.

Which made no noticeable dent in the overall population, only on the present moth, the one at (on) hand. There was always—always, by then—another one (two, three) fluttering in my peripheral vision. They feinted well, pretending to be rising and falling aimlessly when I suspected their meanders were closing in on the cabinets where cereals, flour, grains are kept (those not already refrigerated all these years since that previous attack).

With no comment or prompting from me, the Orkin^® man went about setting a pheromone trap: “You seem to have a moth problem.” Yeah. I agreed, we exchanged pleasantries about the previous affliction, about how they might have arrived, and he left the sticky little box atop the shelves in the laundry room. Hm. The dry dog food is stored in there. I might have taken that as a portent. Should have.

Within days the trap was covered with moth carcasses. Despite, still, peripheral flutterings, I was thinking maybe the outbreak was contained, the killer epidemic averted (I won’t even dignify it by equating it with Ebola; that would be cockroaches). Mothra seemed to be on the decline. Time passed.

Then one day I opened the big rubber bin that holds the dry cat food—and a small cloud of moths rose bobbing into the air. Nooooo. That was my exact, frustrated, exasperated, “why me?” reaction. After swatting more or less futilely at them in their erratic, vague flight, I grabbed the encrusted pheromone trap from the shelves and stuck it right inside the bin when I reclosed it.

In the meantime the cats had begun shying away from their dry food. (Well, not Sem; it would take more than that to put her off food. She used to eat rats—rats she had personally killed, mind you. The boy cats, I should say.) Was it so infested they could tell? I couldn’t detect the sticky web of moth reproduction in the food. Was it that the weather had turned hot? Something else entirely?

When the Orkin^® man returned, I explained that I needed another trap—two traps, actually—and wondered whether the existing moths had colonized the cat food. More likely, he thought, that they had been already in it, had hatched in it. Well, wasn’t that just great, at the steep price prescription cat food is costing me. Not, I realize, that there was much way for the vet to have avoided it, or even known. Maybe it had come from the manufacturer already a ticking moth time bomb.

Two little pheromone houses, then, one within the cat-food bin. Still, every time I opened it was Pandora’s box all over again. Scooping a whole can’s worth of food from the bag within the bin and keeping it in the freezer seemed to make the cats happier. I completely discarded the smaller bag, of non-prescription food, bought for a stray I had been trying to adopt, that had had to be put down instead. Day by slow day, of warily opening the bin prepared to start swatting at disturbed moths (ha! and they thought they were disturbed), their numbers diminished. My grumpiness eased in direct proportion. The inner trap showed evidence of its lethal enticement and stickiness.

Is it over? I know full well that I’ll maintain Mad-eye Moody’s Constant Vigilance, as after any aberrant event, from bugs to fender bender to major storm. For a while. Until I feel the danger has safely passed, or the constant rub of daily routine softens the outlines of the memories, and in obliterating their edge, makes me lose mine. I know that I’ll remember this time, as I obviously have the last, maybe not for the heat and drought (unless those become extraordinary, as in 1998; see what I mean?), but for the imprecise dancing of little wings everywhere. You know, the way people with ways of calculating time vastly different from ours in the “West” say “the year of the great flood,” or “she was born in the year of the moths.”

In the meantime, any little fluttering in the corner of my eye, even far from the field of battle—in the bathroom, the bedroom—and once again I tense, whirl round to slap at whatever it is, cry havoc.