Church Bells

There is a Methodist church just a block or so from me. Shortly after the lockdown started, I began to hear them playing their bells each day for about fifteen minutes, just before eleven.

When I am fortunate enough to be home and get to hear the music start playing, I immediately stop whatever important work I am doing and go outside on the porch to listen.

I set my feet on the ground to reconnect to the earth, lean back in my chair, let the notes carry me away, and remember to breathe for at least those fifteen minutes of the day. 

Some of the songs I know, and my mind supplies the choir to sing along. Some of the songs are unfamiliar, and for those, I just listen to the tones ringing through the air. 

My anxiety levels drop noticeably; the music helps me to remember that all will be well; that this, too, shall pass. I notice my breath, the beauty of the day, the flowers cheerfully waving from their beds.

I appreciated the music so much that I took a walk over there one day, and dropped off a thank you note addressed to the person who plays the bells. Knowing church ministers as I do, I must admit I wasn't overly surprised to receive a thank you for my thank you in the mail a week or so later.

Among other lovely things, she said, "the congregation was looking for ways to connect with the people in the area, wanting to let people know they are not alone." Beyond my immediate neighbors, I still know few of the people who live nearby. I don't know if I know any of the people who attend the church. But the music has worked its magic and when I hear the bells, I know I am not alone in my worries and fears and wish to connect. I feel as if I would be welcome should I ever poke my nose inside the doors of the church. Just knowing that helps to calm my soul a little bit.

They are all at home, but the good people are still out there somewhere. Figuring out ways to safely reach out to connect and love and live.

Good Is.

Bed Bugs. Eeeewwwww!

Loose Park Rose Garden

It was a normal day, just over two weeks ago, when I was visiting a friend in his apartment.

"Do you know what those bugs are?", he asked, pointing to a couple of small beetles crawling across the floor. Nope, I didn't. He has a penchant for bringing home fallen sticks to decorate his place; I thought he had brought the bugs in with one of his finds. Not thinking anything of it, I accepted a small box of food from him and left.

Dismissing the bugs was my first mistake.

Two days later, I got a call from the apartment management company. Those bugs were bed bugs. Normally sleeping off their nightly feed during the day, they were visible in daylight hours only because their numbers were so great that they couldn't all get their snacking done at night.

The manager was calling to ask me if I'd stop by his place to help him move the furniture away from the walls so his place could be treated. Right now, I am the only person who visits him. There is no one else to call when he needs help, and he has an old brain injury that makes him unable to work through the solutions to problems like this one on his own.

And I had brought a box home, and left it in my kitchen overnight.  Eeewwww!

Still, I hadn't seen any bugs, so I decided to keep a watchful eye out. I had a houseful of people at the time; I figured that I'd know soon enough if I had additional, uninvited, guests, because someone would get bitten. No bites over the next few nights.  *whew*

Back to the call: I gritted my teeth, said yes, and made my way back to the apartment a few days later. We moved all the furniture away from the walls, threw away the cardboard boxes and plastic bags he'd been collecting. We brought every piece of fabric in the place to the laundromat for the dry, wash, dry cycle that effectively kills the bugs, and placed them in trash bags in the kitchen as instructed. After I got home from helping him, I stripped outside, went straight to the shower, and put my clothes directly into the washer. We continued to keep our eyes open for bites, still none. So far, so good.

This was a week ago Thursday, the bug people were supposed to be there this past Monday. I went back over Wednesday to check on him. The minute I set foot in his apartment, I knew something was wrong. He hadn't slept, the furniture hadn't been touched. The treatment hadn't happened; a mixup between the pest control company and the apartment management team. They'd been able to work things out, and the treatment had been rescheduled for the same afternoon. Since I wasn't going to stay in his place a moment longer than necessary, we went across the way to a local park to talk.

To my horror, as we sat on a bench, properly socially distanced, I saw one bug, then another, crawl out of his clothes. In the fog of his exhaustion, he'd lost the energy to fight them. He'd become a walking, talking bedbug infestation.

As I inched away, moving to sit on the sidewalk, I asked him how he could stand the itching? Why hadn't he said something sooner? He looked at me blankly - it had taken him a long time to even realize they were biting. On him, the bites don't itch. He's part of the +/- 20% subset of the population who don't react to the bites. Until the people around him started to raise a stink, he didn't realize there was a problem.

EEEWWWWW!!!

I went home still shaking just a bit. I stripped out of my clothes outside the door. But, but. somehow, I missed one. At least one. I was sitting in the kitchen about thirty minutes later, and saw a bug crawling across the countertop. With dread, I squished it. An amazing amount of human blood for such a small creature poured out; a close examination confirmed my fears. I'd brought the pestilence home with me.

I was in his apartment less than five minutes. I'd touched nothing, sat on nothing. All I could figure was that it had dropped from the ceiling into my hair. 

I was in the shower within two minutes. (the pests drown easily.)

After my shower, as I sat contemplating my options, the apartment management team called again. There were so many bugs in his sofa and ottoman they needed to be destroyed. Would I come back to shrink wrap the items and move them out of the building? (Due to understandable liability issues, the building people are not allowed to go into an infested unit.) Wishing with all my heart to give another answer, I told her yes, I'd be back the next day.

Rita, my daughter-in-law, was listening to this conversation. When I hung up, she asked me if I'd like some help. I couldn't believe my ears. She's been listening to the story unfold, she knew how bad it would be over there. Yet there she was, offering to walk into bug hell with me. I have no words adequate to describe the beauty of character she showed in that moment.

After an uneasy night's sleep, our dreams/nightmares full of crawling bugs, the two of us went back yesterday. We were ready. There was a vacant apartment in the building; they opened it up for us to use the shower once we were done. We had plastic ziploc bags to put our clothing in once we were done, soap, towels, a change of clean clothing and shoes.

Reality wasn't as bad as the scenario in my dreams. The chemical treatment hadn't killed all the bugs, but it had put a significant dent in their number. With Rita to help, it was much easier to maneuver and plastic wrap the furniture, get it onto the dolly, and out to the dumpster. With two of us working in tandem, we were able to minimize the amount we had to actually touch the furniture with anything but our gloved hands. Reluctant start to showered finish, we were done in an hour.

We were both exhausted the rest of the day; are still fighting fatigue today. It took a LOT of emotional energy to walk into that apartment.

The heat wave worked in our favor yesterday afternoon. We put our bagged clothing into a trash bag in the hot sun, and left it there for hours. According to the meat thermometer I put inside, my car, parked in the hot sun with its black roof and black interior, it hit the magic 120 degree mark within the hour (they can survive less than ten minutes at temps over 118). When I retrieved the bags of clothing and examined them late in the evening, I saw a couple of bugs in the bags, but they were quite dead. I gave them all a bath in the laundry tub in the basement before bringing them upstairs to the washer, just to make sure, but they didn't try to swim, so they really were dead.

I called the pest control company who'd done the treatment to see what recommendations they could give to keep my house from getting infested. They sent me to a website to order some pheromone traps that'll tell me within a few days if I do have them wandering about my house. (Per the FexEx website, the traps will be here Monday.) If/when the pests do turn up in the traps, rest assured I will not sit around and let them multiply in peace. Professional treatment is pricey, and a pain in the butt to prep for, but I can dig up the money to pay for it. Peace of mind is worth a lot, and that's one of the reasons God made emergency funds. (For his apartment, the management company is scheduling a follow-up heat treatment - that should knock out any critters who survive the pesticide.)

I'm still trying to calm my nerves. I hate doing hard things. But if not us, who else would have done it? My friend is not capable of doing it on his own. There was no one else he could call. 

While bed bugs aren't mentioned specifically in any of the holy books I've perused, the stories therein do have a lot to say about helping out the poor, the afflicted. If this doesn't fall into that category, I don't know what does.

For the last few days, I've spent a lot of time mentally calling myself the stupid Samaritan, but I'm finally getting past that. Yes, I have to deal with the knowledge I probably brought some bugs home. Yes, the easy thing to do would have been to turn my head, walk away, and let it be someone else's problem. But in this case the easy thing would not be the right thing. Stupid or not, I would not be the kind of person I want to be if I ignored his plight.

Bed bug infestations be damned, I did good. Once some time has passed, and I get over the ick factor, I'll be glad for it. When I'm old and in my rocking chair and telling people this story, I'll be able to raise my head high and know that for this one moment in time, I was the hero.  

It'll be a good feeling.

Operation DoGooder: Gratitude

Since helping Kevin get into his new apartment, I've stayed in touch with him by stopping by every so often. Back in December and January, it was every week, but as he's settled in and become comfortable in his surroundings, it's evolved to every other week or so.

Staying home all the time to avoid the 'rona has been hard for him. He'd just started to feel settled, and was looking forward to getting out more in the spring when everything shut down. Like the rest of the world, he's had to adjust his expectations. Other than the people who man the counter at the local convenience store, he tells me I'm the only one he sees. It's a lonely existence.

Still, when I talked to him this past week, he was filled with gratitude. 

He has a television and a deck of cards, and spends his days watching reruns of old classic TV series from the 60s and 70s and playing solitaire. When he first got his antenna and found the channel, he asked me where he could get a TV Guide; he was sorely disappointed to hear such things no longer exist in print. Not one to stay down too long, he spent the next week logging which shows were on when. He only cares about the one channel, and they don't seem to change the lineup too often, so he's now set and knows what show to anticipate watching next. 

With his newfound freedom to set his own schedule, he's settled into a night owl's schedule and goes out for a walk each night in the wee hours of the morning. While we gave him the basics to furnish his apartment, the package was sorely short on decorative items. After a few months of staring at the bare walls, he couldn't stand it anymore, and he's started bringing home fallen sticks from his nightly ambles. The branches, along with a few live plants he's gotten his hands on, go a long ways to making the place feel like home.

One of the benefits of staying where he does is the physical connection of the building to a local social services center where they offer a free lunch each day. (He's fuzzy on the details of why they do this, but enjoyed going down for his daily social interaction before the virus stopped everything cold.) The people of his building, all of them at high risk for complications if they catch the virus, can no longer come to lunch, so the Center has taken to delivering lunch to each apartment every day instead. He looks forward to the daily knock on the door and rushes to open it before they get too far away, so he can shout his thanks down the hall.

Food, safety. He can control his own schedule. He lives in a decently maintained building and pays an affordable, sustainable rent. He's a shining example of something gone right in a world gone tospy turvy.

It does my doGooder heart good to see him doing so well.