Oh. NO. They’re back. My nemesis species. I have a neighbor who, despite having spent his entire life in this rat-infested burg, harbors a paranoia of the rodents that borders on maniacal. Honestly, I don’t care if the rats have organized dance parties in the alley every night. (They usually hold it down to Fridays and Saturdays, and it only becomes a problem when some domestic rat violence breaks out, but then the rat police show up and they all go quietly back to their holes.)
Rats usually have the decency to stay outside and not bother inhabited dwellings. They really only get on my nerves because they insist upon dying right in my garden, right in front of one of the rosebushes, and usually right before company arrives. Nothing says garden party like decaying rat corpse.
My infestation paranoia revolves around fruit flies. I absolutely do not understand these stupid things. I realize that I am one of the world’s worst housekeepers, but I do not as a rule leave rotting fruit lying around the kitchen. They don’t even seem to have any interest in the kitchen garbage can. Their obsession, apparently, is swarming around the sink whether it has any dishes in it or not. They die in record numbers, leaving their nearly-microscopic mortal coils stuck to the dish towels and kitchen curtains. If there does happen to be a dirty dish in the sink they flock to it, drown in whatever water remains in the dish, and float about until I wash them down the drain. Understandably, they’re not the Einsteins of the animal or even the insect world, but one might think that they’d have the sense to aim for a more reliable source of food. Every summer that I spend in Baltimore I become more swayed to the medieval belief that life spontaneously generates. I have left the house for a weekend, having cleaned in full-blown Prussian mania before going–no dirty plates or pans, empty and dry sink, nothing remotely edible anywhere outside sealed canisters or fridge–and come home to discover a fruit fly infestation. These Stygian little pests generate themselves out of thin air.
They don’t really DO anything to you. They don’t bite, as far as I know, and anything they do attack is probably already spoiled or thrown away. I’m not sure why they bother me so, but I grimace every time a cloud of them (and they DO form clouds) rises over the kitchen sink.
Bugs are a part of everyday life anywhere in the South. I will concede one thing to the New Yorkers: they’re perfectly willing to call a roach a roach. Baltimore has the usual cockroaches and also this other, larger, more disgusting strain of roaches. Of course, civic pride won’t allow us to admit that the city is annually swamped with roaches, so Baltimoreans try to calm panicky visitors by explaining that "it’s only a water bug." Water bug, my ass. It’s a roach. A BIG roach. On Virginia’s otherwise genteel and beautiful peninsula, one might be sitting on a screened porch (Wonder why they’re screened???) enjoying a drink, before noticing that the moonlight has been blocked out. One then discovers that the entire screen has been covered in roaches. WINGED roaches. "Oh," the Tidewater native will casually tell the visitor, "those are only palmetto bugs." Again, I say, palmetto bugs my ass. They are big, disgusting and WINGED roaches. In the Tidewater, roaches can FLY, and they obviously derive considerable glee from doing so.
I will always recall the impression that a Northern friend took back from a visit to Macon. He was staying with a very nice old family and had many cocktails. Before they all retired, he offered to take the glasses out to the kitchen. The matron of the family thanked him but advised him to, if he would, rinse the remaining dregs out of the cocktail glasses "because, dear, we ARE in the South and we DO have bugs."
One of my more jaded friends, a longtime Baltimore resident but native of suburban Washington, finds great humor in the fact that I refer to certain geographical areas as "buggy." Note to jaded friend: if you ever have to spend a night in Chincoteague or Fort Story, "buggy" will take on new meaning. We all know what happened to the First Settlement at Croatoan: the mosquitoes carried the colonists off to feed to their young.
I think that I’ve lit upon an explanation of a major cultural mindset. Cleanliness is just not that much of an issue for Southerners, even aristocratic Southerners. If your silver is polished and the chandeliers glitter, it doesn’t really matter if there’s a foot of cat hair underneath the sofa. My mother has a friend from the Midwest who thinks that the greatest compliment one might bestow upon a woman is that "you can eat off of her floor." To this my mother always responds "That might be, but why would you WANT to eat off of the floor?" We know that keeping one’s nice things clean and shiny is important. We do not need to eat off of floors because we have four different Limoges patterns representing different generations and tastes. (Personally, I am armed with enough rose-bedecked china to feed the entire Imperial German Army, which come to think of it isn’t such a bad idea.) I am now starting to understand that the reason we don’t worry about obsessively scrubbing everything else is that we know, no matter how much we scrub, bleach, deodorize and sanitize, we will have bug infestations anyway. All that time spent cleaning is time that I could, much more happily, spend with a few drinks and a Thomas Nelson Page novel.