Sylvia's Journal

While I was away (this to establish I had nothing to do with what follows) Axel and Tessa emptied the living room in preparation for our new fireplace project. When she opened the kauri shell holders of the African mankala game she found a wriggling mess of maggots (imagine the screaming!). They appeared to be coming from a thing that Axel described as a piece of a cow’s hoof. (I think it was a piece of the devil, as we have forgotten our good intentions about alcohol and computer use). How the thing got there and why it was crawling with maggots remains a mystery. Then, as they removed stuff in the neighborhood of this mess that was sitting on the old blanket chest it turned out the maggots were everywhere: in the plants (thrown out), in the piece of Turkish rug (banned outside in subzero temperatures) and the chest itself (banned to the unheated porch).

Last night, several weeks after this unpleasant experience, while I was eating my Nepali chicken with rice I noticed a wriggling rice kernel on my placemat. It was another maggot that had fallen from the ceiling. It made me wonder how many others had fallen in the rice and blended in with the food.

“Gross,” was all Tessa could say while we all looked at the ceiling and examined our food more carefully. Armed with the vacuum cleaner Axel started to inspect the ceiling of all the downstairs rooms. We found a few more of the creatures, tucked in the crease where walls meet ceiling and even some brazen ones slowly moving across the ceiling. Tessa and Steve happily returned to their nest in the studio across the driveway – even without plumbing on a winter’s night, it was more appealing than the main house with its unknown and invisible production center of these little white worms, so many weeks after Axel and Tessa’s discovery. We will not have a Christmas gala in our house this year I think. I also hope that the source is in or near the fireplace so that the workmen will get to find it.

Although we left the ceiling clean last night, this morning we found another wandering maggot which went the way all its brothers and sister have gone. We now walk around the house looking up – which balances out my walking outside which is down.

This experience has answered two questions: (1) should we get a cleaning lady to come in once in awhile? (Yes, this would be a nice Christmas present together with the new fireplace roof work) and (2) what kind of ‘surprises’ and rhymes to create for our Christerklaas celebration on Christmas Eve. I also think we should not eat rice for awhile.

While we were preoccupied with the crawly creatures the first big snowstorm of the season came in and left us with a perfect Christmas landscape and the first entry on a snow shoveling bill that will be presented later this year and shared with the neighbors.

No flying today and none tomorrow as another storm is heading our way.