The Fleas

Rough Draft

They appeared one day out of nowhere it seemed. Or maybe I had noticed one or two – a stray one which hopped from my fluffy-grey shampooed cat onto my arm; another which had innocently hitched a ride from the yard – and simply hoped they would just go away on their own, disappearing from my sight and my memory as if we had never even met. Benign little house-guests who wished me no harm…

I don’t recall the exact moment that they took over our house and my sanity. I just remember the little bites that became a familiar, itchy decoration around my ankles. I told myself this unattractive wound display was from the gnats that were undoubtedly finding a way into the house when my daughter took her toddler time dancing in and out of the doorway on the way to our grocery runs and visits to our yard to play frisbee with the dogs. We had just moved into this house and had inhabited it only a few months. While it was an old house, still –wasn’t there a warm-up period before vermin and stubborn insects decided to seize your new home?

“Ants, Mommy,” my daughter would reach her tiny finger down in a pointing motion to her little leg, following it with an “I itching…”declaration much to my frustration. I had worked with animals and had flea outbreaks in my home before. Not a pleasant experience. Still, I didn’t panic. Instead I proudly kept a grown-up head about me: “We’ll have to have someone come and spray,” I stated flatly to my husband, ignoring the horror of my memories with flea infestations before. This time will be easier. Last time we waited too long to take care of the problem.
It was a simple matter of sitting down with a telephone book and a few minutes of quiet. Toddler-free for an hour, I could search the pages of pest control gurus until I found our guy. The one who would make the expanding problem of the fleas who reproduced their families and grand-families in our home history.