Thursday, December 13, 2007

Tuesday Morning


Ever have one of those days where from the minute you dare to get up in the morning, little things start happening that taken all together (say, by quarter past nine) add up to something that makes you think: I knew I should never have gotten up today. Or: Well, just because I’m up doesn’t mean I can’t go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. NOW.

Yes, I know you’ve had those days, because if you’re reading this, you’re probably human. Then again, the ants I just slaughtered in my bathroom are probably having one of those days, too, and maybe the survivors (damn them) are brooding about it this very minute.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I am, among other things, a farmwife. My husband is, among other things, out of town. Of course. I say of course because the minute he left, the cat got sick, the rain started falling (for the first time in eight months), the winds howled, the deadly poisonous spiders came out and the ants came in. Oh, and I threw my back out - wonder why.

And the house, which had been if anything too warm for months, got cold. Very, very cold. Now, I could turn on the heat, because we do actually have central heating here in this old farmhouse, something I begged, cajoled, threatened us into getting some years ago, and something which, when I turn it on, my husband takes as a major act of betrayal. “It’s not actually cold,” he will tell me. “The thermostat says it’s forty-five degrees in the living room, and that’s the warmest room in the house,” I will reply. “.....I’ll make a fire,” he will offer, turning off the heat. “Good,” I will answer, turning the heat back on and smiling sweetly. “That would be wonderful.”

Said husband is two thousand miles away in the wilds of Canada. I could turn on the heat and leave it on, twenty-four hours a day, and he would never know until he gets the bill for the replacement propane which I will be forced to order by about next Wednesday. But I am a farmwife. I can make a fire. I like the way it looks and smells, crackling in the old woodstove, and the cats love to lie in their chairs - I say their chairs, god forbid my husband or I should actually try to sit in one - by the fire, dreaming of all the half-dead gophers they will present me with the minute the weather turns warm again.

So....I get out of bed. The house is cold. I check the thermostat just to make sure. I am even more right than I thought I was. So I open the stove door, and shovel out half of the ashes from yesterday’s round-the-clock fire, because too many ashes in the stove make it difficult or impossible to get a new fire going. Some of the ashes are still warm, glowing red, even, and I am shoveling them into the only thing I can find to take them outside in, which is a large paper grocery bag, which is starting to smolder. This is mildly alarming, as I’m not sure what I would do if the bag suddenly burst into flames in the middle of my living room. But it doesn’t, and I manage to dump the ashes outside into the metal garbage pail we use for this purpose, and crumple up the still smoldering bag and place it in the stove as fire starter, which it is obviously trying to be.

Time for kindling. We don’t actually have any kindling. What we have are splintery logs from the diseased trees we were forced to cut down last spring. “You just pull little bits off the logs,” my husband explains, yanking mightily and sending a shower of splinters all over us, including several into his finger. “Ow,” he says. “You could use the ax instead.”

Right. And chop off my finger and drive myself half an hour to the emergency room. That sounds smart. Instead I scour the house for old newspapers (of which we have stacks in July and exactly one now that I need them) and the woodpile for small bits of bark and twigs.

Soon, after I blow what’s left of the ashes all over the living room floor to fan the blaze, a little fire is merrily burning. Whew. Time to add actual logs, selecting ones of just the right and increasing size to encourage steady, even burning. Oh, and checking for spiders while I do it.

Not just any spiders. Black widow spiders. Deadly poisonous black widow spiders. The kind that probably won’t kill you, but might if you’re very young, very old, or very unlucky, the kind we have swarms of, that supposedly love woodpiles above all other places to call home. The kind that are probably clinging to the underside of the log I’ve just selected, so that as I slide my finger carefully underneath....

Except that our black widow spiders, of which we have so many that I’ve killed dozens in a single hideous rampage, do not seem to like woodpiles. I’ve never actually seen one in or near a piece of wood. Our black widow spiders like the undersides of chairs I’m just about to sit in, the legs of tables on which I’m serving my elderly relatives tea, and the outside walls of the house, where they poke fetchingly out from under the approximately five million shingles, just enough so that I know they’re there, but not enough so that they can’t beat a retreat the instant I come at them with the can of spray which says it only kills on actual contact.

It adds a special thrill to making a fire when there’s just the tiniest possibility you will be bitten by something that will have you rigid with excruciating pain by the time you’ve had a chance to drive yourself to the hospital where they don’t always have a supply of the antidote that they’re not really sure will work.

I make the fire. I think that prick I felt mid-way was just a splintery bit of wood. I didn’t see a spider fling itself into the flames just after its final act of giving me what it thinks I deserve. It takes between a minute and twenty-four hours for the pains to set in, by which point I may be unable to drive myself to the hospital and be forced to call my neighbor for help whose phone number I can’t find and who will not be home. But enough of daydreams. The cat pan calls.

Yes, Max the cat is sick to his stomach all right. Maybe, as my husband suggests, the antibiotics I’ve been giving Max twice a day (and that’s a lot of fun, let me tell you) since this started three days ago, a few hours after my husband walked out the door, are making it worse. Maybe, as my husband suggests, the antacid is making it worse. Maybe, as my husband suggests, the fact I am keeping Max in the house for observation, which Max hates, is making it worse. Maybe the new food I switched to at my husband’s suggestion because he thought maybe Max might be having a bad reaction to the old food, is making it worse. Maybe I have a few suggestions I might like to make to my husband about how he should get home and deal with the damn cat pan himself.

As I am cleaning the inside of the pan I note with joy that Max has peed all over the outside of the pan and the wall behind it, and the resulting flood has worked its way under the pan which is what smells so good. And which I cannot clean up without dumping the entire pan out, turning it upside down, wiping it off, wiping up the wall and floor, letting it all dry, and refilling the pan. Which there is no point in doing until I find the bottle of Urine-Off we use on the all too frequent occasions when something has upset Max enough that he feels he just has to let us know about it in his own special way.

Only there is no bottle of Urine-Off anywhere to be found. Apparently my husband has drained it in a cleaning foray of his own, for which I thank him, and not replaced it, for which I do not thank him, especially not right now when I am about to pass out from the smell of cat pee which has been pooling under plastic for many hours.

I add Buy Urine-Off to the list of mental chores I’m compiling in my head, mop up what I can of Max’s statement, light a stick of the strongest incense I can find and leave it burning in the laundry room on top of the washing machine a few feet from the pan where I hope its smell will not discourage Max from using the pan at all.

Yeeeecch. Time for a shower. Except that the ants have found the shower again. A little line of them is pouring out of a teeny tiny crack way up in the farthest corner of the ceiling (it only takes me fifteen minutes of solid searching with a huge flashlight to find this), across the top of one wall where I can just barely reach to wipe them away if I stand on top of a dangerously tippy stepstool on my tiptoes, across the top of the other wall, down the wall where my towel is hung, down the towel, across the top of the tub over the bathmat and into the shower. Clever ants. I admire your ingenuity, I really do. I admire your group work ethic, your persistence, your feats of derring-do. I hate to kill you. Now where IS that can of Raid.

The special thing about these ants is that they bite. They make a point of it when you’re mopping them up with wet paper towels. They like to bite you on the fingers and hand and a few like to escape and crawl under whatever you’re wearing and continue to bite you for many hours afterwards. It’s enough to make you take off all your clothes and walk around the house itching and inspecting yourself like a maniac.

I have risked my life on the stepstool and most of the ants are now dead and I am standing sweaty, bitten, naked, itching and really, truly needing a shower except the bathroom smells like Raid and dead ants, and my towel which is dark blue is doubtless still crawling with survivors as are my pajamas I’m sure, and I really need to run a wash first since until I do there won’t be any hot water in the shower for a reason neither I, my husband, nor an ever-changing rotation of plumbers can understand....but I really do not want to go in the laundry room just now because it smells of incense and cat pee and I am tired of being in there.

I need a cup of coffee. I really do. I am not sure I can face the kitchen because I think the moths that live in the cupboard where we keep the sugar have come back. If I go out to get a cup of coffee, Max will have another episode, the ants will revive, the moths will mate, the spiders will creep into my unmade bed, and the now roaring fire will leap out of the absolutely safe woodstove and burn the house down.

I flick off a few last ants that have gotten way too intimate with places I’d forgotten were part of me, put on the purple sweatpants and green Christmas sweatshirt with cavorting reindeer I’ve been living in since my husband left, and drive away.


(first published in Western North Carolina Woman Magazine)

No comments: