Theresa Lewis

Sometimes in life screaming is understandable and acceptable. If someone accidentally slams a door on your fingers, it’s okay to scream. If you’re being attacked, it’s okay to scream. For the most part, as children, we were taught to keep our emotions in check. I can understand that because we were ten kids at home and no one wanted to hear screaming all day long. We were also taught to speak in a normal tone of voice. I guess it was good at that time. It sure was conducive to a relatively quiet home.  It made us learn how to deal with happenings in life. We were constantly reminded to control our emotions.

 

One house we lived in when I was a teenager had a rat problem. Not initially, but when all the row housing on the street behind us was torn down to make room for more modern housing, rats that resided in those  ancient buildings had nowhere to go so they flooded neighboring homes.

My parents called in exterminators to rid us of the beasts. The poison of choice back then was a mixture of powdered plaster and brown sugar. The rats would go for the sugar mixture, but the plaster made them thirsty so they would look for water. Once they drank water, the plaster in their bellies would solidify, which ultimately led to the rat’s demise.

 

I should mention here that my dad had an unholy fear of rodents of any kind. The rats we had were the size of house cats. One day, I found a dead rat in the basement. I could have carried it out in a paper bag to discretely dispose of the dead carcass, but I decided to have a little fun with it instead.

 

Dad was sitting in the kitchen having a late breakfast. I took a piece of waxed paper so I could hold the rat by the tail. With my arm outstretched, I walked past my dad who promptly lost his ever-loving mind. I got the reaction I had hoped for. I was laughing my head off as I went outside to toss it over the chain link fence that separated the housing area from the train tracks on the other side. Still laughing, I flung the dead rat as hard as I could to get it over the fence, but my effort was not quite as good as it should have been. The carcass hit the top of the fence and bounced back on me, hitting me in my open mouth because I was still laughing at my dad’s histrionic reaction. I did a war-dance in disgust that truly rivaled the one my dad had done moments earlier. The word ’YUCK’ doesn’t even come close to describing the feeling of having a dead rat whack you in the lips while you mouth is open, but then I guess you’d call it karma… what goes around, comes around.  

 

As a young wife, I loved doing housework. I took great pride in having everything tidy and clean. Back in those days, I used a string mop to wash the floors. In my mind, the string mop did a better job than a sponge mop and it was less taxing than getting down on my knees. Normally, I left the mop inside the bucket in the laundry room. For some unknown reason one fine summer day, I decided to move the mop and bucket into the garage.

 

Alone at home with nothing better to do with myself one day, I decided to wash my kitchen floor. Being a bit on the clumsy side, I did as I usually did… put the bucket on the floor and filled it with hot water from a measuring cup until the bucket was full enough. I didn’t trust myself to fill the bucket under the tap in case I dropped it. I put a measure of cleaner into the hot water. I kind of noticed that there was a bit of froth on top of the water, but I didn’t really bother about it.

 

I washed most of the kitchen floor by wringing out the mop with my bare hands. At one point, I looked back at my work and noticed some weird looking lumps all over the floor that I had just finished washing. I thought my string mop was disintegrating and leaving little bits of string on the floor. What can I say? That wasn’t the problem. In reality, those little bits left behind were maggots that had germinated in my mop. Once it hit me what it was, I lost my mind and shattered the calm silence of my home with shrieks of horror. My mind screamed for weeks every time the memory crept into my idle mind of squeezing those bloated maggoty bodies through my bare fingers as I wrung out the mop. That was a major ‘Yuck’ factor. I really thought about going for therapy to get past the trauma and horror of that event. It still freaks me out to this day.

 

This past week, I took my garbage out to the community disposal bins. We have nine bins for compost and nine for trash. I don’t look into the bins when I take the garbage out. I lift the lid quickly, just enough to see if there is space for my trash.  When I see a bin with space, I don’t look, I just quickly toss and drop the lid. The first lid I lifted was full to capacity. When I lifted the lid, a funnel cloud of thousands of fruit flies flew into my face. What does one do in a moment of shock like that? They gasp and suck in air. In my case I sucked in a huge mouthful of fruit flies that almost made me vomit. At the same instant, a huge tangled lump of what looked like old rice fell out of the bin and landed at my feet as I jumped back. I instantly dropped the lid. It wasn’t rice. It was maggots as I noticed that the disgusting rice looking things were clamoring to get back into the bin. Apart from the shock, the ‘YUCK’ factor was over the top. Now, I definitely need therapy to get past this trauma. The worst part is that I have to visit those disgusting bins on a weekly basis.

I have heard it said that what you don’t learn to deal with in life will constantly plague you until you do deal with it. Now you know what’s in store for me.

 

THE END