Pantry Moths in the Summer of High Trumpism
The weather in New England hung hot and humid. I like summer, but it wasn’t a summer to like. Everything unwanted got suspended in the sticky thickness. Summer became endless between the mosquitoes and the politics, which were worse than ever — and that’s a year after Charlottesville. There was a squirrel population boom; one worked its way into our house three times. And then there were the moths.
Every time I walked into the kitchen, a moth, pale brown, beige in the worst sense of the word, appeared from some wall or pantry door and took flight. To rid the kitchen of them, I dumped food from jars, emptied half-eaten boxes of crackers and cereal. I wiped pantry shelves and got into the corners. Even then, the moths seemingly floated into sphere, impervious, despite best practices.
One morning, my husband inspected my handiwork. Then, he peered into the pantry further.
“I think they are in the holes,” he said. The pantry had adjustable shelves. Those shelves required holes. “See how the holes are cloudy? I think the moths worked their way in.”
Those fuckers. It wascloudy inthe holes.
“You take Saskia to her soccer game,” I said. “I’ll do this.”
**
It’s not the first time I’ve delved into muckiness. Babies were a long time ago, but I remember. The way I pulled out a shirt I’d worn during pregnancy and postpartum after one baby and discovered it still smelled of sour milk and baby puke. The diaper blowouts, the pee showers during a diaper change. Mess defines babies.
There was a time of muckiness after the babies got a little bigger and it included but was not limited to stickers on windows, pieces of incisively sharp Lego on the floor, more crumbs, dishes everywhere, so many notes and drawings some of them precious but like diamonds in the rough impossible to tell which ones, Hand Foot and Mouth disease, endless green snot and way too many snow days, stuck zippers, soggy boots, swimmers’ ear, classroom separation from your best friends, homework, junky party favors, blue frosting and candy and slushies and bubble gum, pinworms, lice, stinky feet, other stink, and slammed doors. Like stories about White House leaks, every day a headline appears that couldn’t possibly be a worse one than that. But, some new bug appeared, or sticky mess splashed across the kitchen floor. To raise growing children was the happiest hell I could possibly imagine. Politics is so much worse.
**
I pulled the remaining food still left in the pantry out onto the counter. Two boxes of cereal, lots of tea, dried fruit, a bag of popcorn kernels, vitamins, peanut butter, the usual pantry stuff. I grabbed paper towels, cleaner, and a box of toothpicks.
I listened to the news. The news wasn’t good. It was like the summer, overheated and heavy and Kavanaugh said “precedent” or “settled law” interchangeably. Which meant you won’t fuck with it? He wouldn’t say. Like mosquitoes or the moths, women kept appearing out of nowhere and then speaking out, because Roe. And because we aren’t pests; we are, in fact, people. In the hearing room, on the streets, on the Senators’ phone lines, women seemed like the plague, though. We were fevered, as if we’d been bitten. Whatever ill had been carried by the insects, dengue fever maybe, or Kavanaugh, caused us to gnarl and moan and scream. We appeared unwell. We had become unwell.
For over an hour, I scraped pantry moth detritus out of the holes. Moth remains came in three colors: sick silky white moth junk, disembodied brown papery wings, dusty dirt brown gunk and dirty red on the toothpick ends.
There were still children in cages even after the ACLU sued and won and the judge reprimanded the Trump administration, even still. I scratched and dug and scraped and picked around and around and into the holes for pantry moth gunk of all types. My fingertips hurt. My neck craned. I hated the moths. I hated the administration for its continued steady destruction of everything decent.
Two summers ago, it was clothes moths. I spent forever, but really about four days, sorting through the clothes piled in drawers and closets and the sheets and towels and blankets. I had to sort, clean, get to the drycleaners, bemoan, toss, wonder why I’d kept so many things. I wiped drawer bottoms and shelves and put back far fewer clothes and hoped no more moths remained. I felt profligate — all those clothes — and Inundated — all those moths. I felt plagued. I remembered things I wore often and noted unworn things with tags. For months, I feared the moths’ return. Eventually, I calmed down, but not entirely. This summer, there were clothes moths in couches and rag rugs. The only thing to do was get rid of infested items, even ones we loved.
After an hour deep in the pantry, I sprayed and wiped shelves and sides a second time to make sure there was no trace left of the embedded moths. I thought of the phrase “nit-pick.” Anyone who has had a lice infestation (we have) comprehends that the phrase is specific and meaningful because it’s so real. Pantry moths in holes in shelves had a phrase. But it was the same damn principle, the one that we’d have to apply to the Trump administration after it finally leaves if dictatorship doesn’t happen first, and that’s to get the rot out, the political appointments hired to twiddle thumbs and buy inordinately expensive desks and fly on Air Force One and undo every environmental regulation ever made, and student loans, too.
**
Many summers ago, a pesky squirrel chewed its way through my kitchen screen. For weeks before the chewing, it clawed its way on and hung there. I banged the window and yelled time and again.
“Go! Go away! Get out of here!”
I screamed sometimes until I felt hoarse, because it would jump down only to jump back up and claw again.
One day it chewed its way in and I walked into find it inside the screen. My babysitter at the time came downstairs and bravely opened the side porch door and the squirrel, having raced from kitchen to dining room window, raced out. We slammed the door, shaken.
Like lice, that first invasion — or in the case of lice, the first infestation — was the worst. We never got lice as badly as that first time when we had no idea they were even a real possibility and by the time a friend found them on our child, he was covered in them. Eventually, he went from waist-length hair to a buzz cut. Whenever lice returned, there were a couple of eggs or maybe one full-bodied bug, never the horrific plethora.
So, years after the squirrel I named Karl Rove had been banished, another squirrel began to claw my kitchen screen and I banged the window again. Terrible political times harkened squirrels. Never during Obama did a squirrel gnaw at my screen.
I walked onto my driveway one afternoon to see a squirrel on the screen.
“Go away!” I screamed. I came closer. One was gone, and another was inside the screen, inside the kitchen window.
“Fucker!” I yelled.
This time, because I knew it had to leave and would, I went around to the other back door, came in from behind, opened the porch door and the squirrel, belly full of stale Newman-O, darted onto the side porch.
They were the Stevens: Bannon on the outside, Miller on the inside.
I got the screen replaced. This took a couple of weeks.
Once the window screen was replaced two weeks later, I was surprised to come home and find anotherchewed-through screen not three hours post-replacement.
I closed the window. I’d wait on that screen until autumn. If autumn ever returned.
Days later I came home to find the dining room screenhad been chewed through. The squirrel had come and gone, self-service.
With each assault on my house, I thought of even more terrible members of the Trump administration, tenacious and mean people willing to serve his interests rather than the country’s.
I closed that window. Even still, the squirrel chewed on the outside of the windowsill, the green painted wood. I called a wildlife control expert to set traps.
“I’ve seen squirrels chew their way out of a house but never into a house,” said the guy I had in my phone as “Mark Wildlife.”
The traps caught four squirrels. Two were caught and released. Two died of heat or shock, or both.
**
I can’t say I felt sorry for the squirrels. I can’t say I feel sympathetic to the white nationalists or the woman-hating GOP senators or Trump, either, our most illegitimate president. I am not in a cage, nor are my children. I am fortunate in so many ways, most especially with the chance to afford help when I want it. Anyone who saw the Mister Rogers documentary thought of his iconic advice to children to “look for the helpers.” The hardest part is to imagine what it’s like when you can’t find them — and the situation is dire, rather than a nuisance rodent chewing its way into your house. Even “safe” though, this administration so far has me thinking in the muck of moth carcasses about how long and how hard it’ll be to keep picking at the rot. I call DC often. I ask about the children and demand the families be reunited. I ask for health care, for reproductive agency, not to start a nuclear war. I inquire about the president’s tax returns. I remain polite, but I’ve become more insistent as the months stretch on. I have never cursed at a congressional aide. I save my curses for the radio and the squirrels and the moths.
