Sunday, July 29, 2012

Buzz Kill

My favorite poet Emily Dickinson once famously wrote “I heard a fly buzz when I died.”

I’m guessing she perished in Switzerland.

Irritating Swiss behavior number 419: they don’t do window screens.  Now for all you Westerners out there who are thinking, “boo-freakin- hoo, just turn on the AC,” let me also inform you that the Swiss don’t yet realize it’s 2012. Translation: we should have packed more deodorant. 

The irony of my situation is that I consider camping my own personal form of hell (with exercise coming in at a close second).  I don’t do nature, public showers, bug spray, or lanterns, and I certainly don’t share my living space with winged species. 
I have turned into a woman obsessed.  I spend the better part of my day with a fly swatter in my left hand and a citronella candle in the right.  I scour the house before going to bed to ensure a rogue fly has not attached itself to a wall, which is nearly an impossible task considering the amount of insects we encounter...




After reading and combing through numerous medical journals, I have discovered that a baby's susceptibility to choking is due to the esophagus having a similar circumference to that of a drinking straw.  Now for those of you who suffer from the same rational fears as myself and have also uncovered similar information, I trust you have repeatedly tested this theory.  Unfortunately, my experiments have proven what I feared the most: a fly is a precise fit.

The ingredients for a perfect storm are brewing inside of our non air conditioned home: open screen- less windows, a horse barn directly behind our property, and a mouth-breathing baby.  I have taken this discovery to Kate (who also happens to be suffering from a fly epidemic in her Swiss abode), and she dismissed this concern as OCD. "Tell me one person who has ever choked on a fly," she chided. Apparently Kate doesn't read medical case studies...





Since no one else will take my situation seriously, I asked myself, "What would Laura Ingalls do?" I decided she would purchase $500 worth of night vision camera equipment so she could assess her baby at all times.  My new, amazing baby monitor allows me to zoom and pan around her entire nursery in search of these esophageal-sized flies and react in record time when one is located.

My crisis is, for the moment, averted---I am now the biggest fly on her wall.






                                                                         

No comments:

Post a Comment