My first week of summer was everything I dreamed of all winter and spring.
These are some of the wonderful things that happened:
- I slept in every morning (trying to catch up from finals week) and drank coffee in my pajamas.
- I pulled 23 unread books from my shelves—all acquired with good intentions and little self-control—as a start to my summer reading list (and finished three and a half of them).
- I napped on a comfy couch because we don't have air conditioning and it was too hot to do anything else (Michigan decided that May deserves mid-August weather too, apparently).
- My housemate and I took turns picking movies to watch in the evenings (“You haven't seen Indiana Jones?”—Only the one with the aliens. “You haven't watched all the Rocky movies?”—Nope. “You'll love Dead Poets Society!”—I did).
- I wrote for fun, instead of for a grade (no papers due for three months—hallelujah).
It was bliss, but nothing gold can stay.
Week number two started out with:
- Mysterious welts on my housemates' legs.
- The struggle for her to find an urgent care that was open on Memorial Day.
- The conclusion that they were probably from bedbugs.
The fear of bedbugs meant a chemical treatment that costs hundreds of dollars, pricey special covers for our beds, and spending an entire day cleaning the house and putting almost all of our belongings into plastic bags to kill any bugs, larvae, or eggs. It meant throwing our mattresses into the backyard with panic and rage, a thumping heart with every dark-colored fuzz in my peripheral vision, paranoia at every tickle or itch on my arms, anxiety about my housemate's worsening allergic reaction to her bites, fear of accidentally transporting an egg-laying parasite somewhere else, and being unable to close my eyes at night without envisioning bedbugs crawling out of the dark to feed on my blood and leaving big, red, oozing, burning, itching bumps on my skin.
As I said to one of my housemates late one night—exhausted from a day that included at least one breakdown each among the three of us—it was a hellish week.
Someone along the way said we eventually would laugh about the whole thing. Though I didn't believe her at the time, she was right more quickly than I would have expected.
When the exterminator came, he carefully inspected each mattress, box spring, and couch cushion, and he told us he saw absolutely no evidence of bedbugs anywhere.
With no reason to go through with the chemical treatment, he left, and we laugh-cried about all the work and panic and stress and tears we had gone through—for no reason.
I was reminded of:
- All the times I had indulged my tendency to overthink and worried about something way more than it needed to be worried about.
- All the times that a bad situation fell upon me like a shoe squashing a—well, a bedbug—but reversed just as quickly, before I had to do anything hard or scary.
- All the times that a disaster brought me closer to people like my poor bit-up housemates.
- And all the times other people showed kindness when times were tough—like the people who came to help us and went above and beyond, including doing things like providing a place to sleep, fixing our storm door, mowing our lawn and cleaning our kitchen.
I hope all the hullabaloo taught me to appreciate good days and good people, and not to make Mount Doom out of an ant hill. But—I make no promises about how I'll react the next time I see a bug in my room.
