The Plague

They’re coming….

Today I’m focused on bugs.  Brood II cicadas – the kind seen every 17 years – will be visiting an East Coast neighborhood near you very, very soon. As one columnist noted last week, the last time they were here Bill Clinton was president, and Charles and Diana were about to divorce.

The scary cicada population is going to contribute further to my early onset deafness, but those aren’t the only bugs I’m worried about.

Summertime is when the lice like to play, too.  Especially in the long tresses of sweet young girls who turn into barefoot nymphs during those warm weather months, lying in the grass, head-to-head.  And it’s not like this behavior stops when they become teenagers – I’m told the head-to-head thing actually gets worse because girls like to take pictures together on their cell phones for Instagram and their Facebook page, etc.   Don't have a boy child in the house, so I can't speak first-hand to their lice vulnerabilities, but I know they have them.

Lice freak out everyone.

Short story.  Our daughter was 7 years old, and my sister and her husband were visiting us from Austria.  They agreed to watch the little one while my husband and I stole away for a beautiful, overnight stay at a Washington, DC luxury hotel. A-hem.

But as we were packing to leave, the discovery was made. LICE!!!

My sister had a major meltdown; our daughter’s lice rekindled painful memories of her own battles against the dreaded bugs when her daughter was small (the daughter who is now in her 30s. You’d think my sister would have recovered, but no).  Her trauma was based on one particularly persistent battle, when she shaved my niece’s head because those nasty little critters simply wouldn’t leave.

But back to my story:  When she was small, our daughter sometimes slept in “the big bed” with my husband and me – and had, in fact, the night before.  So our romantic evening away was only the second time we’d left her alone with family members.  We promised our daughter that, instead of bunking in the downstairs guest room, my sister and her husband would sleep in our room, right next door to hers.

My sister refused.  It didn’t matter if we washed everything in sight (which we did, delaying our departure by several hours).  Lice had scarred her for life.

So why am I bringing this up?  Well, I read a short article this weekend about a women who is a “lice whisperer” – she gets rid of them for a price because parents with or without advanced degrees seem incapable of it.  She had once been one of us, shaken and stirred by them, until she discovered a lice whisperer of her own, who taught her the Zen secrets of combing long hair with a nit-catcher, I guess, and unwittingly introduced her to a new career. 

Good for her; plus, she seems to enjoy her work because she is making a material difference in the lives of families all over Northern Virginia.  But it’s not that big a deal, on reflection, and it doesn’t mean you live in a tenement if you get them.  For example, our house is reasonably clean most of the time, if a little messy, and we’ve had our share of bouts with lice through the years, ping-ponging them back and forth with our neighbors.  No doubt we’ll have more but they can be managed, if you use the right treatment – including the new, non-chemical, more organic products for you purists out there.  Some of those treatments (we’ve tried them all, I think) can make your hair look and feel like a million bucks afterward.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple to get past the whole cicada nightmare.  Their carcasses will be everywhere.  They will crunch under foot and under the wheels of your car. As they plunge to earth after their post-coital humming, they will land in your hair or on your windshield. Ick.

Now, about ticks….