If ever you’ve done battle with pantry pests of any kind, you’ll feel my pain. The moths that originally came from the birdseed on the back porch found enough food in my house on which to live. For a long time. I’ve had them before in pasta that sat around too long, but that infestation was fairly easy to deal with—lose the pasta, kill a few stray adults, and the episode was over. But oh, not this time. Things came to a head when I found a larva crawling on, well, it would gross you out to know, just like it grossed me out to see it, so I won’t tell you. So I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned to get rid of eggs and stray larva, but they make their cocoons in tight corners and crevices, and I knew it was just a matter of waiting until all those emerged. Every morning, we check our ceilings and vacuum them off, check the moth trap, and keep an eye out for the rest of the day. Our body count has decreased to under 10 a day, and I think it may soon be under five. Thank God!
Completely unrelated, but much more noteworthy, is the children enjoying one of our Christmas letters from a few years ago. They liked reading the funny stories about themselves. We were discussing this at dinner last night, and Nate mentioned that he used to ask me what I was eating. It was true, I told him, that I couldn’t sneak anything by him, unlike his eldest brother. I went on to explain that I used to hide things in the sink and eat with Bradford in the room with me, and he’d never catch on. They continued discussing life in general while finishing their salad, and I, having finished my salad, went into the kitchen, talking as I went, got myself a sloppy joe, and came back to the table and ate it at a normal speed. Bradford then asked Mark, “are we eating anything besides lettuce and flour sticks for dinner?” Some things don’t change much.
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