It has been darn buggy around our place–those small, useless gnats that usually hover a little around the fruit bowl are persisting, flourishing.

We’re in week 2 of heat waves, and the bugs get bolder. Last night Calvin fiipped his wig over a large American cockroach in the basement. I always try to be too busy to rush right over at the sight of a bug, so he kills it before I arrive.

It wasn’t always like this. When Calvin and I were first together he was terrified of bugs. When I was 13 months pregnant in late July an immense waterbug landed in our bathtub and I was the one who had to kill it.

Let’s allow that to sink in. Hugely pregnant me (with Daisy) spraying poison and then whacking a broom at this prehistoric Cadillac of a waterbug while my mother and Calvin, the people not carrying potentially sensitive genetic material, cowered. That was a real awakening for me in my marriage, though I cannot recall how I sent Calvin the message that he needed to step it up and keep the fetus away from the fumes metaphorically and literally.

Nowadays he’s good with bugs as well as dead things. Six months ago I walked into the kitchen to see a mouse’s fuzzy butt squeeze into the back of the stove. A week after the exterminator came, I found a dead mouse in my office.

I was going to dispose of the dead mouse, but I found myself unable to, which really threw me for a loop. I’ve always been coldblooded about animal death. When my cat Preggy almost killed a weaselly creature in the backyard while my friend Michelle and I were on the trampoline, I was the one to whack the distressed animal to death with a shovel. I like animals, I don’t wish them harm, but I’ve never been squeamish about their bodies or their deaths.

This was a trait I shared with my father. Once my dad and I went on terrible hunting trip together. I had pitched a magazine story about hunting as wildlife conservation, but the hunters wouldn’t allow me to come on the trip unless I brought my dad.

The entire experience was humiliating in myriad ways, but one of the better parts was during a windy snowstorm on the side of a mountain, my dad ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while standing over a dead elk as the real (sexist) hunters cut it into pieces they could load on their mules. I remember thinking that it would have been better had he not eaten lunch at that time but that mostly, I wished I had a sandwich too.

But today’s me could not move or touch that dead mouse, even with a wooden spoon. Calvin had to.

Goodness, what a departure and I’m not even close to the point yet.

Tonight as dinner—stuffed peppers, this time with the cabbage packet—wound its way to doneness, I realized I needed to wash my half handkerchief mask so I could wear it tomorrow to exercise.

I went outside to pin the wet mask on the line and saw Maggie’s dirty hot tub water. I smelled a different bad smell in the alley, one I hadn’t smelled before.

It hit me. Insects are breeding in the greenish water in that hot tub. What the fuck?

It swept me back to late summer two years ago, when my father, he of the PB&J at the side of butchered game, died of West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease. How could I have allowed that dirty hot tub to sit there, breeding, for weeks? What was wrong with my eyes? What was wrong with my nose? What was wrong with my brain?

I reported it to 311 tonight and tomorrow I’m going to do something else.