DISCLAIMER: The following is not for the faint of heart. If you are at all squeamish, you should stop now and go here.
I’ve been swatting flies in my house like there is no tomorrow.
And of course for the flies, there is no tomorrow.
For some reason, in the Autumn they come. I don’t know if it’s the first rain or cooler temperatures or if they like football but for three years now we have about a 3-4 day period of entomological cleansing. We’re talking Amityville Horror here.
We have these beautiful, oak, french doors in the family room. We call it a music room because our family consists of three cats, a piano and three guitars and they all live in that room. Of course the cats live wherever they damn well please but they include that room as suitable for kitty habitation.
I think at least one fly couple, coupled around that door somewhere because that is where the congregate.
When we got home from Los effing Angeles Tuesday night there were a fair amount of flies buzzing around. We kind of looked at each other and said, “Here we go again.”
I looked around the house for a suitable swatter and the best thing I could come up with was a two-year-old Bonny Doon vineyard catalog. So I slaughtered a dozen or so of their nasty asses.
Then came Wednesday. We walked in the door and Linda informs me that I need to wait until the kitties are done with their dinner before I start swatting because as she said, “There’s gonna be some swatting to do.”
No big. I can kill flies with the best of them but honestly, I don’t think I was prepared.
The French doors were nearly covered near the bottom and like graduated up to the top in little black specs. Because they’re just little flies. I think they’re baby flies. And they’re slow and sluggish, fortunately. This makes them much easier to slaughter.
It takes about an hour and a half of jogging back and forth from the kitchen to the music room slinging my Bonny Doon catalog left, right, up, down, to kill of every last one of them. And this creates a bit or a mess as you might imagine. I then have to go around with super hot water and sponge cleaning up fly insides from counters, stovetop and dishwasher. I also have to sweep up their little fly carcasses into a dustpan.
For some sick reason, I like to wait until I’ve killed them all (OK, some do escape) before disposing of them. I just want to see them all in one big pile in my dustpan. Maybe it’s a sense of accomplishment, I don’t know but in the end, there are so many of them that they actually make a sound when I empty the pan in the dumpster outside, almost like I had swept up a pile of thumbtacks.
And my Bonny Doon catalog is looking pretty nasty.
So driving home tonight I got two brilliant ideas. Sadly, I already knew that another battalion would be waiting for me when I got here because the proliferation had already begun in the morning. My two brilliant ideas were 1) First I’ll just open up the doors and sort of shoo them out as best I can. Since they all tend to congregate on the doors this should be fairly effective. Unfortunately, the doors open inward. If they opened outward, surely the bulk of them could be coaxed outside thus sparing all of us the unpleasantness that would follow. 2) I’ll buy a flyswatter!
Standing in line at the Albertson’s with a flyswatter in hand I realized, I’ve never purchased a flyswatter before. My first flyswatter!
I think I’ll be buying another new flyswatter tomorrow because after the slaughter was over tonight I was sweeping up scores of flies and lots of little pieces of blue plastic. I basically shredded the swatter.
Sometimes swatting didn’t seem like the best method like when I was washing dishes and my hands were wet and the swatter way lying on the floor. In these times I used whatever method seemed most convenient.
I stomped on, with just my socks on, at least a few, a dozen or so were drowned in the sink and washed down the drain. When a couple of particularly stubborn flies landed on the stove under the grate I simple lit the burner. I even killed one with my bare hand.
I want to say here that I did open the doors and I did shoo a large population of flies out before the killing began. And throughout the bloodletting I kept the kitchen window wide open so as to give any semi-cerebral flies an opportunity to flee. Not many did.
Trust me I didn’t enjoy a nanosecond of this and I am trying to be somewhat humane about this —even if it doesn’t seem like it — but how do you deal whit hundreds of houseflies buzzing around your kitchen?
What would you do. 

When I was a kid growing up in Plymouth, Michigan, we had a house at 615 Fairground Street and our phone number, once we finally got one, was Glenview 3-6034.
The Fultons, who lived next door had GL3-6032. The Maycocks, directly across the street had GL3-6036.
That’s how Michigan Bell did it back then. They assigned you a phone number based on your address.
Sometimes, you could pick up the phone and hear your neighbors talking. We didn’t have we they called a “Party Line,” at least that’s not the way I remember it, but the phone system was just not what it is now.
The house was built in 1929. I know that because it was stamped into one of the posts holding up the roof on the back porch.
The house was owned by my mother’s father, Harry Maynard.
Harry Maynard, my grandfather, loved two things in life more than anything else.
First, Harry loved fishing, and there were lots of places within walking distance of 615 Fairground Street where you catch bass, bluegill, sunfish, perch and all manner of “panfish.” He also loved ice fishing. Just because it’s 10 degrees below zero outside and the lake has a 3-foot sheet of ice over it does not stop a fisherman from his favorite passtime.
Harry had one of the most extensive collections of fishing tackle I have ever seen. Or at least it seemed that way to a 6-year-old boy who adored this man. All of his tackle was already many years old and had probably aided Harry in catching countless panfish and probably even helped sustain him and his family in down times.
The second thing that Harry loved in life was wine.
I’m not talking about Chateau Mounton Rothschild or Domaine de le Romanee-Conti. I’m talking about MD 20-20, Bali Hi and Thunderbird. Harry was not a wine collector, Harry was a wino.
I don’t mean to dishonor the man on the freaking internet but the fact that he was buried, next to his wife Mary, on June 20, 1964 in Riverside Cemetery, Plymouth, Michigan, is directly related to his decades of over indulgence. He lived 60 years.
Mary Maynard, who never took a drink, was buried there on August 6, 1948 at age 38.
When Harry died my mother and father had the house at 615 Fairground Street. We had all been living there for years already. My mother grew up in that house. I grew up in that house.
I have photos of my mother in her high school graduation gown standing in the driveway where I played with little green, plastic soldiers and parked my stingray.
When my mother graduated from Plymouth High School, in the same building that I attended 9th grade, in 1943, she would have been 17 or 18 years old but she already looked much older than that.
My mother looks like she’s 30 in photos I have of her when she was 6. She had the same face from the time she was a small child until the day she died in 1993.
When I dream of her, which is quite often, I see her face, just like it was when she was 17 or 18. Just like it was when she was 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. She has only one face to me. It’s the face in the photo above which was taken when she was 17 or 18. I love this photo of her.
Ester Louise Maynard-Gapen was buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Plymouth, Michigan on November 23, 1993, right next to Harry and Mary Maynard.
She lived 68 years but today, she would have been 82.
And I miss her, a lot.