Lord and lady of the flies

We've had a fly problem. Tens, dozens of flies, crawling on the windows, hopping around in the kitchen, gathering in my seedlings. "They're coming in from outside," Eric said, having read up on fly life cycles, and suggested we clean out under the back steps. But while this is undoubtedly a good idea, I thought that was unlikely to be the problem. And if it was, weatherstripping and a sweep made more sense. No, I was certain that something had died, probably in the basement, and we would have to find it and get rid of it. And before my mother comes for Maia's birthday in two weeks.

So tonight I said, "I want to figure out where the flies are coming from." In reality it could have been just me who did it...but I didn't want to find a flyblown corpse in my dark basement alone. 

So Eric got his shoes and accompanied me. More flies, dead ones this time, littered one of the back rooms in the basement. (The stairs go down to the laundry room, then curve back to this room, then to the one containing the furnace and the crawl space access.) "Okay," Eric conceded. "The source must be inside if there are this many dead."

We poked through storage boxes, the shrouded baby carrier, the defunct tool bench. "This is a fly graveyard," Eric said, looking at the tiny corpses. "But what killed them all?"

"I would think they starved," I offered. "Only no, wherever they're spawning should be able to feed them."

"Maybe not for long," he said darkly, and tried in vain to turn on a light over the tool bench. (Hey! I've never committed a true unintentional Tom Swifty before.) "Should I get a new bulb?" I offered.

"Yeah," he said, and proceeded to the rearmost back room while I tripped up the stairs to get a bulb. 

I heard a whunk and an "Oh!" and shouted from the top stairs, "What is it?" Then, noticing how loud I was, said, "I'll be down in a minute."

"Okay," he called, as Chloë called for me from her bed. 

"Who is here?" Chloë asked when I poked my head in.

"Nobody. We're moving things in the basement to find where the flies are coming from. So we can clean it out. Nothing to worry about." I removed myself and went back downstairs.

"What is it?" I called when I was back down in the basement and braced to hear "a squirrel must have gotten in..." or something similar.

"The crawl space door was wide open!" 

We'd been in the crawl space earlier in the year to fix the front porch, and evidently never closed it. Now that I think about it, I feel like I remember wondering if we'd closed the door, but never going to look before I forgot. Evidently the flies bred outside in a sheltered place, as flies do, and found the wide-open crawl space door...

"They'd fly through here," Eric said, gesturing at the now hammered-closed door. "They found themselves in darkness. They went toward what light they could find, which was that," gesturing toward a cutout in the wall that led toward the laundry room, "and the ones that were smart..."

"You realize you're talking about flies."

"...The lucky ones made it upstairs."

I looked around as we circled back to the stairs. "So what we should do is wait a couple of weeks and then come down here and clean up all the dead bodies."

"Yep," he said, and we mounted the stairs to get back to the light, and leave the fly graveyard.

Possibly one of the sexiest things my husband has ever said.

Certainly the sexiest said while in an all-male World of Warcraft raid chat:

"The misogyny in this conversation is getting to be a little much."

Discuss.

Complicated

"I'm not sure what I'm planting in the garden next year," I said last night. "But I should probably act like we're going to be here an extra year."

"Yeah?"

"Well, maybe it would be a selling point--but then, if things are bad enough that a vegetable garden is a big selling point, we're probably not going to be able to sell the house."

"My mom asked me about that earlier," Eric said. "She wanted to know if we'd considered the economy regarding our plans to move. I said of course we had, we're not idiots. Only not in those words. I said yes, we've discussed it. That we've been discussing it off and on for months."

"Did she bring up her contention that we'll never move? Or that we won't come back?"

"That was the other mother," he said. "But no, she didn't mention that. She was just asking if we'd thought about it. Especially if we're going to be spending all this money to try to make sure we have a kid soon."

"Moving with a newborn would not be fun," I said. "Neither would moving while eight months pregnant."

"Right. So next year is going to be complicated."

"I think..." I said. "I think we're probably going to end up staying an extra year. But I'm not willing to give up yet."

"That's fine," Eric said. "We'll wait and see. We could always put the house on the market and see what happens. And maybe things will get better after the election."

Not special

We spent today with Eric's family. It was a fairly nice gathering, but I heard more about my in-laws' opinions and feelings and prejudices than I have in a long time. As we drove home I thought, My God, he's just like his family, why did I marry him? and worried vaguely. So I asked him about it: do you think you're different from your family? In what ways? Why do I get so tired after a day with them when I don't after a day with you?

This led to discussions on the nature of giftedness and potential, and how in our younger years we were both expected to Do Great Things, and how those Great Things were always in the nature of "win the Nobel Prize" or otherwise change the world. We were never led to believe that we might someday use our potential to be passionate and voracious debaters, or excellent at customer service, or the person everyone in the office goes to for help; or that that would be an acceptable use of our talents. We were never told that we would most likely be just another speck on a cog in a machine, and children have, I now know, no concept that being an adult in contemporary society is just that. We were always told that we needed to sparkle externally, never that it would be okay to quietly be a good and talented person without being outwardly exceptional.

I've been struggling with this ever since I left grad school, but I never thought about it in quite this way before. Eric says he has, because he had to come to terms with what he's decided to do with his life. He does feel he still has the capacity to change the world; but it's going to be more indirectly now, and he doesn't feel the need to change the world so much as to change his students. He has better goals now, more focused ones. I'm working on developing my own. I wonder what my EEP friends are doing with their lives, and whether they think about these issues as often as I do. I kind of hope not; I hope they've either become outwardly exceptional and are happy, or have come to terms with not changing the world and are happy.

(Also I hope that if someone does change the world, some of them have a hand in it. Far better them than, say, my mother-in-law, whom Eric says he's tempted to write in as his vote in the next election, but knowing what I know he knows about her political opinions, I don't think he's serious.)

Daydreaming

I wrote 2024 words yesterday and hit 35K. Shoelace is in a fun stage. Have I been trying to write scenes that aren't enough fun? Hard to say. I'm in that interesting place where I can tell that what I’m writing is bad (or at least not what I want), but I can't tell what to do to fix it. For now, I'm forging ahead. Eric has been very good about, when I complain aloud that my writing sucks, saying either, "No it doesn't," or "We'll fix it later, shut up and write." I love how he says "we." I can imagine this story being a good one; I hope I can do the work to get it there. And yes, I can use his help.

I also shoveled snow with Eric, designed that Celtic cable and realized that it doesn't look right with this yarn, planted the blanket flower, and realized that our floors are filthy. I didn't used to be this bad a housekeeper. (I used to have half this square footage, too.) Sigh. Today, I came in to find leftover bagels and pastries on my desk and demanded to know whether my department had had a party to celebrate my being gone. They didn't; most of them were gone too. Yesterday we had loads of requests, naturally; today, not so much, so we're all slowly getting caught up. I'm daydreaming a bit more than I ought, but I think I can afford it.

"Oh yeah," Eric said sleepily as we settled into bed last night, huddled together to drive off the cold of the bed and the room. (Our bedroom is right above the porch, and the floor is the coldest in the house.) "I forgot about this earlier, actually we both did, but I guess that's the way it goes, so..."

"What?" I said, tense with wondering what he was going to tell me. Had we forgotten a bill? An appointment? Did we lose a bunch of money in our stocks?

"...Happy six-month anniversary."

Chocolate, the sovereign specific

I mentioned to Eric in an e-mail that I was having a particularly bad bout of PMS (pre- and peri-) this time around. He said he was going to the grocery store for things we needed, like milk and toilet paper. When I got home, two Symphony bars were waiting for me by the door.

To be honest pure chocolate might have been better as a cure, but it was so sweet that he'd gotten my self-professed favorite--and not the stuff that we both like--that my mood was lifted anyhow. "One of the few ways in which you're a typical woman," he said, watching me break open a bar.