Strawberry Time

2009-06-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

A dismal spring. Late frosts, rain and gloomy clouds, dampness and a morning rawness, the heat on since September. Frost continued after Memorial Day, plants moved inside, and then out and slowly the leaves unfurled. Vermonters are miserly this spring and with good reason, for they have little income left after fuel oil and propane, town and state taxes. But we have had maybe three glorious days and the sugarers had the best syrup season in almost a half century and today local strawberries hit the market. Last year they were tasteless. This year they are sweet and juicy; a wet spring does have its blessings.

Fleas

2008-05-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

The following story is from my new book, Nothing Hardly Ever Happens in Colbyville, Vermont, that will be published this fall. It is one of 28 chapters.

My friend Ted Ross has a couple of travel companions he is never without. The first are his two Springer spaniels, Arrow and Barney. The second is his continually recycled bottle of gin. Neither is more important than the other, although I have never seen Ted kiss his gin bottle. Neither have I seen him suck on it. Rather, he prefers his gin shaken with a smidgin of vermouth and served, with two olives, in an over-sized martini glass—which is refilled about five times every evening. Amazingly, this gin-guzzler rises every morning without a hangover and his good humor and wit intact.

So, yes, I am used to Ted arriving at my house in his beat-up Texan truck now scoured robin's egg bleached blue, with 200,000 miles driven on it between Texas, where he quail hunts in the winter, and Hollowville, New York, where he has a home he just reverse mortgaged ("I have no kids and I need the money and so what?"), my home in Vermont and a fishing lodge camp he established in Nova Scotia. In the cab of the truck , when he pulls into my driveway, are two dog pens, a bag of dog food, his hunting clothes, a sheathed Holland and Holland over and under 20 gauge shotgun, a gallon of cheap sherry, a duffel bag of clothes, and a box which contains his gin, vermouth, and maybe a wild turkey or pheasants he has collected from guiding at a hunting club near his home in New York. In his hay day Ted was a salesman, a tennis and ski instructor, squash and piano player and...he is in the Social Register. Now he has the personality and physical characteristics that are absolutely Falstaffian.

Ted sleeps in my spare bedroom with his two dogs. Sometimes the dogs are stretched out on an old sleeping bag spread on the floor next to the bed or they are sprawled on the bed, sandwiching Ted. He stays for a couple of days and if it is hunting season, we'll go out with his two dogs in search of woodcock, a pastime we have enjoyed together for over 40 years.

We catch up on stories, we don't discuss politics because his philosophy is in tune with Attlia the Hun and mine is more Don Quixote on a liberal quest. When he hits the threshold, which is often three gins and a half bottle of wine, his face turns redder than normal, the jowls enlarge, he squints, shakes his head from side to side, blinks furiously and reminisces about wonderful hunts and wonderful Springers he has owned. "God, but we have lived in the best of times!," he'll say.

I agree and remind him that his liver must be blacker than licorice liver pills and that one day he will explode from the alcohol he consumes. He claims that the juniper berries in the gin keeps him healthy.

"I drink, therefore I am."

Ted's visit in the fall of 2006 was special. Very special.

He stayed for a few days, we did some hunting, and he left for home. Two days later my daughter Dodie and her partner Fred arrived from England and took over Ted's bedroom. My daughter runs a Mexican restaurant in London and imports chilies from Mexico. Ted is an excellent chef when he is sober but by the time he is ready to serve the meal he is potted and that's often how the meal tastes. Dodie, on the other hand, doesn't drink and cook. So we were eating well, doing some hiking and general leaf peeping.

The day after Ted left, Dodie came up to me with a troubled look on her face and said,

"Dad, I'm scratching a lot."

"Fleas!," said Fred, who was scratching even more.

"TED AND HIS DOGS," they said in unison.

I immediately drove to the hardware store with Dodie and went to the flea buster shelf. I was checking out the products and Dodie looked at me and screamed:

"DAD, THERE'S A FLEA ON YOUR CHEEK!"

I bought two cans of flea spray and drove home and sprayed the floor in their bedroom, the hallway, the bathroom and living room and myself. I was scratching too.

Fred and Dodie flew back to London. She called the next day.

"Dad, Fred scratched all the way home on the airplane. My ferrets have fleas! They never had fleas! Doesn't Ted use Frontline?"

My God, I thought, are the international flea police going to pester my daughter and me? This might become a global incident. I went online to find out about fleas. Between 1347 and 1350 Bubonic Plague and the Black Death killed 200 million people and devastated the population in England and Europe. The cause? The oriental rat flea carried on the back on the black rat.

Was this the beginning of a pandemic?

No, the cat flea is the culprit in America. No pandemic, just itching, pain, frustration, paranoia and the sense of being diseased and living in a diseased house.

What I found out is that when Ted departed, with dogs, they left behind fleas. A female flea, that parasitic, warm blooded, blood-slurping animal with saws and sucking mouth parts can lay 20 eggs after one blood meal. It doesn't take too long for ten female fleas to create 1/4 million fleas in various stages of their life—egg, larva, pupa and imago. The last two bite. I was flea infested. My house was flea infected. And I was the only blood meal.

I am not sure whether fleas are epicures or gourmands. They did not bite my daughter. They love to suck on her partner Fred's blood and they really love me. We must be three star destinations.

The first night I spent scratching. Welts grew on my ankles, calves and on my arms. A semi circle of bites decorated my anklebone. I bought anti-itching cream and a gallon of flea spray and doused the sleeping bag and floor and bed. There is an old wood floor in the guest room—I renamed it The Flea Room—and I flooded the spray into the cracks between the floorboards.

The fleas then invaded my bedroom. I bought flea bombs and bombed bedroom, hallway, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Then I sealed the doors and left the house for a couple of hours.

When I returned I checked the room. I got down on all fours and inspected the floor. I saw a little black speck and touched it and it jumped a couple of inches. I took out the vacuum cleaner, put some mothballs in the bag, and vacuumed the floor and the cracks. I did the same to the rug in my bedroom. I did this in the morning and the night. I washed all my clothes and bedding every morning. Then I held the filter of the clothes dryer to the light and, yep, fleas were embedded in the screen.

I started my inspection tours wearing a white t-shirt, underpants and a long pair of bright yellow soccer socks. I walked in the flea bedroom and sat on the bed and looked at my socks. Soon black specks were climbing up my socks! I vacuumed again and bought another gallon of spray and pumped the spray into the cracks.

I removed the bed, an Ikea futon on a wood frame, and moved it outdoors, flea busted the mattress, and sold it. I took the sleeping bag and any movable rugs and hung them outside from the deck railing.

However, I still had those suckers in my bedroom. I ripped up the wall-to-wall carpeting and carved it into strips and took it to the dump. I moved into an empty room and slept under a clean blanket.

It was now a week since Dodie and Fred left. I washed my clothes and bed sheets once a day and inspected the dryer filter and it always had fleas stuck on the mesh. My yellow socks, when I sat in the living room or in the bedroom, had these little black specks climbing up them, like a Delta Force.

I could not sleep without coating my itching legs with salve and finally, calamine lotion. I became depressed and didn't want to see anyone, well what would you think if you found me walking around all day in my underpants and yellow soccer socks and bent double inspecting my socks? I vacuumed and bombed and sprayed and still I found those little buggers climbing up my yellow socks.

Fleas are jumpers and climbers. A flea 1/8th of an inch long can jump 7 inches high and 13 inches. Just imagine if they were two or three inches long, with their saw and sucking tube mouth and antenna that could read the CO2 we animals put off and they go on attack mode just from alerts from their motion and heat sensors. I had 40 bites on one leg. With each bite the flea injects an anti coagulant and some of their blood. What if 40 three inch fleas attacked me? What if millions of fleas formed a global army? All of us humans would be sucked dry and then what would those fleas do?

I called an exterminator. "I'll get rid of them" he said. "I always do and I guarantee that. You have to leave the house for a day. $75 a room."

He arrived with his gear and I vacated my home and hid in the woods. When I returned I called him up and he said,

"Don't worry, you're flea-free."

I did the yellow sock check in the flea bedroom and sat on the bed I had moved in there from my bedroom. Within two minutes black specks were charging up my socks. I screamed in anguish and called the exterminator.

"That's impossible," he said.

"You want to look at my new bites?"

"I'll have to call the state. There must be a new breed."

He arrived with his poisons and redid his thing. I put the socks in the washer, dressed and left.

When I returned I did the yellow sock test. More troops, just hatched, were assaulting my kneecaps. AAARRGH!

I did some analytical thinking. These fleas were propagating in the the cracks between the floorboards and maybe the flea poison isn't penetrating deep enough. I had a brilliant idea. I put on my pants and drove to the hardware store and bought a couple of cans of polyurethane. I want back to my home, changed back into my flea uniform of underpants and yellow socks and literally poured all the polyurethane into the cracks. I then bombed the room, closed all the doors and opened the windows. It was turning cold and I kept the room shut for a month. I bought scatter rugs to go over the floor cracks near the bed. I bought a new bed. I called a carpet cleaner to treat my other rugs.

The last flea I saw jumped on my hand while I was reading in the living room. I sprayed the floor, the chair, vacuumed the rug and floor cracks, scattered mothballs on the floor, threw all my clothes into the washer and jumped into a very hot bath.

Six weeks after the first flea bit Fred my home was flea-clear. My flea bites healed. I washed and put away the yellow soccer socks, although every time I look at them I itch.

Needless to say, I let Ted have it when I saw him next. He only uses cell phones and cancels the service when he moves and so it is hard to reach him. He's a penny pincher when it comes to living expenses and he doesn't like unpleasant calls.

"Don't you use Frontline on your dogs?"

"It's expensive," he said. Well, I did check the dogs and they were covered by fleas and I could feel them crawling on me at night but they never bit me!"

"Probably because of your gin-soaked blood," I said.

He laughed. "Another good reason to drink."

He wrote me a check for $300, about half of what it cost, not including new rugs and then looked at me seriously.

"You know, a dog would have collected those fleas instead of you. You ought to have one. I know where you can buy a Brittany spaniel for very little"

Ted still visits and arrives with his springers and his Gordon's or Fleischman gin. He brought a peace offering of a wild turkey he shot. His dogs are clipped well and he uses Frontline.

I know now if fleas go on steroids, the human race is doomed.

Peter Miller from Vermont

Strawberry Time

Fleas

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