Twelve hours and two flights and we’re finally home. Of course we were worried about what we’d find, because if you remember there was no power when we left, BECAUSE OF THE TORNADO.
We’d cleared out the fridge before we left because we had no idea when the power would be back. Usually, I like to clean the house thoroughly before I go on a trip. You don’t want to come back home to dirt when you’ve lived in splendor for a week. (More later on the splendor.) But Gary insisted that we NOT clean, because we should focus on packing, and then the tornado arrived and fouled everything up. We got as far as running the dishwasher.
The house smelled musty: that was about it.
Well, until I repositioned an oven mitt on the counter and found an oven-mitt shaped …
Colony
Of
Maggots.
You’d think I would scream, but no, I can report that maggots make we whimper and point, and that makes Gary scream. (To quote: “WHAT IS IT WHAT IS IT I’M NOT COMING OVER THERE UNTIL I KNOW WHAT IT IS.”)
There was another maggot on the kitchen sponge. The sponge and both oven mitts are in the trash bin now. Another maggot came up out of the foul-smelling drain, so we drowned him in bleach.
We don’t usually have maggots.
What we finally decided was that the dishwasher cycle was interrupted early in by the power failure, so the dishwasher turned into a steamy slow cooker of food residue. Of course, I don’t know how the flies got in there, but they laid eggs and then the maggots came through the garbage disposer and drain and nestled in the evidently damp oven mitt and kitchen sponge.
Or, perhaps God has visited us with pestitlence because the tornado didn’t get us.
5 responses to “Finally Home”
I’m never going on vacation again. That’s disturbing.
We have a maggot farm on the deck. They breed in our compost bucket. The lovely gold dust geckos live on them, and we have quite a colony of themn ow.
And we have cockroaches. And termites. And several species of ants. And fleas. And mosquitoes.
And frogs that shriek all night.
But nothing overbreeds. It’s kind of a balance of terror, and we can deal with it.
Amy in StL – I’ve never had this happen before. And you can avoid it by not being struck by a tornado right before you leave for vacation.Hattie – There you go! Everybody has maggots. Now that the baby birds are right outside the back window with their little beaks pointed to the sky I wish I had those maggots to feed them.
Probably the most disgusting thing that ever happened to me occurred when I was about 10 years old. I bought a candy bar out of a vending machine. I took a bite, felt something moving in my mouth, spit it out, and yes: maggots! I could puke right now.
Gina- that is the worst maggot story ever! I came close when I was in college with a pop tart from the quad store. The maggot crawled out through a Pop Tart hole after I took a teeny bite in the crust. Gary hears these stories and assumes maggot eggs are in everything, which I guess is somewhat true.