Gainesville, Florida
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The optimal time for a termite swarm is when the weather is warm, humid, and still, and the day after rain. From their colony in the walls and floor of our apartment––one quarter of a nineteenth-century two-storey––this year the swarmers chose an evening in late May. After they launched themselves into the air, where they quickly paired off––picture a nervous scramble like a weightless blue light disco––they discarded their wings and fell to the earth to mate, all while thinking their mission to populate a new colony was a success. Though they hadn’t been swarming towards the moon, but rather the lone ceiling light in our study.
The original colony was large enough to provide a couple of weeks of these nightly swarmers. It isn’t true that the more termite swarms one experiences, the less horrifying they become. Every morning P. vacuumed up the mounds of wings left on the windowsills and floor in the study and study bathroom, while I stood in the doorway and made disgusted noises and pictured the house eventually crumbling beneath our feet, its foundation a Swiss cheese of termite city.
When the fumigators finally arrived, our landlord put us up in her tastefully decorated and well-maintained Victorian B&B. It looked like a version of every B&B I have ever seen on TV. There was the grand, curving staircase with framed ghostly black and white photos of the original owners. There were thin, wobbly side tables adorned with fine china figurines, clocks, commemorative plates, framed watercolors. There was floral and paisley, red velvet, black and white tiles, detailed relief work on the door frames and skirting, intricately patterned rugs, stained-glass windows. Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto was blasting on repeat. The bed was four feet off the ground, so it had to be climbed into.
The main feature of the pool was the enormous sign mounted above the spa that listed the “pool rules.” The water was salt, though I didn’t feel extra buoyant. The mosquitoes hovering above the pool were plump. The green Astroturf surrounding the pool was a clean spongy surface to drip-dry on, a lovely green, and better than fire-ant-infested real grass. Wrapped in his towel poncho, I watched our eight-month-old stroke the plastic blades of grass with a single extended finger, utterly mesmerized.
Back in our room, I somehow got the TV stuck on CNN.
Four days later, the fumigation tent that had been erected over our house was gone. The trees and plants that were trapped on the inside of the tent were impressively dead. All that was left were bare branches, a few brown leaves, while the foliage a foot away was perfectly lush. One snake didn’t make it out––it had been poisoned mid-escape, while slithering out from under the house. There were likely more snake corpses under there, too. Though inside, our apartment wasn’t scattered with insect carcasses as I imagined it might be. I am no good with insects––for one, I have a fear of butterflies––but there was an eerie quietness surrounding our house, an emptiness that we––the humans, dogs, and cats, occupying the four apartments––couldn’t fill. I wondered, is this what it would feel like after the apocalypse for those unlucky few emerging from their bunkers?
The insects have already started to come back. I have seen a cockroach in the living room, a moth in the storage closet, one of those shiny horned clicking beetles in the hallway, and a hornet got itself stuck between one of the windows and window screens in the bedroom. On the one hand, I would rather they didn’t come back, but on the other hand, it’s good that they have. When I take the eight-month-old out in the stroller, he likes to sit as far forward as possible so he can look at everything we pass, his head turning furiously from left to right, hungry for it all. I try to guess what he’s looking at so I can narrate for him––the different trees and plants, the shapes of their leaves, the sounds they make rustling in the breeze or shook up by a squirrel, the bright, bright sky, the heat from the sun, our wobbly shadows on the sidewalk, the birds and insects zipping along our path. And when we see a butterfly I try not to panic and frantically wave my arms. “Look,” I say instead––calmly, warmly––“it’s a butterfly. It’s alive and it’s doing its thing.”