The Flies

After the ants were mostly gone, I started to relax, and I finally stopped sleeping with the Windex bottle. I thought we were finished from annoying bugs once and for all, but I was wrong. One morning I woke up and came downstairs for breakfast to find 6 or 7 flies swarming around the kitchen and living room. We had been married for 4 years, and had still never purchased a fly swatter. I’d seen Kasey kill the flies with a towel before, so I attempted to do the same. It turned out to be a lot harder than it looked. I spent close to a half hour chasing one fly around. Finally I saw it land on the cupboard and I moved in for the attack. Before that fly knew what hit him, he was on the counter, dead… well almost. The humane thing would have been to just kill the poor guy, but I didn’t want to smash him with toilet paper because then I could feel it squish between my fingers and I hate that feeling. So I did what any sensible girl would have done, and covered it with a glass. I’m pretty sure it died a few seconds later, but then I still had the problem of a dead fly on my counter, and I would still have to pick it up with some toilet paper or something. So after several minutes of contemplating the dead fly under the glass, I made the decision to leave it there until Kasey arrived home from work.

The next few weeks were spent fighting the flies. Our battle strategy consisted of following the flies around with our eyes until they landed, then smacking them as hard as we could with a wet rag. The kids became just as obsessed with it as Kasey and I. Cody would run around the house with a rag screaming, “Where is it Mom?! Where is it?!” Then he would pretend to find the fly, fling the rag into the air, and bend down to pick up the phantom bug. Throughout the day, Isabella would randomly point in the air and yell, “Right there! Right there!” About this same time, Cody had two incidences where he was stung right on the face by bees. Surprisingly, he still wasn’t terrified of flying insects, but they definitely made him very uncomfortable. Now every time he saw a fly, he would freak out and shout, “There’s a bee!!”

The laundry was starting to be filled up with fly rags so fast that I couldn’t keep up with it all. We would go through seven or eight in one afternoon. I had a fly swatter on my grocery list every single week, but I would somehow forget to grab one every time I went to the store. So one Saturday night we spent our date time searching for a fly swatter, combing the entire Walmart, and asking every sales associate we could find. Each helpful Walmart employee had another suggestion of where we could look, but we were continually disappointed at every new department. Our search was in vain, so we continued to fight our war with nothing but rags.