1/2/22: War & Peace

I’m at the point where I’m just eating the gnats. Sure, if I’m near a sink I’ll rinse the smeared little corpse off, but I’m not wasting whole Kleenex on one of these guys and somehow carrying around my own personal gnat bodies bag is grosser than just eating them. So I smash one against a surface, then lick my finger and go about my business. Today I got one that tasted like dish soap, and I can’t tell if that means my plan is working or not. I sprayed the most infested plants with a mix of Dawn and water, trying to kill the larvae in the soil. It’s only been a day but I have definitely seen a decline in gnat numbers and so I’m just fingers-crossed that the gnats die off before the plants do, which seems like a risky proposition but a) Dawn is the one they use on birds after oil spills, right? So my dang plants should be able to handle a little sudsy water, and b) the gnat situation, it’s BAD.

Here’s where it all went wrong: I bought a house. A townhouse, which feels like a clarification I have to make so I do. This is the first place I have ever lived that doesn’t belong to someone else and boy howdy I’ve had some lousy supers in my day, each accompanied by a standard-issue creepy and/or scary handyman, and it’s true what they say: you don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve filled your house with gnats and it’s nobody’s problem but your own.

My mom and stepdad live in a neighborhood just five miles from where I am and they have an almost comically militant HOA. There’s a Modifications Committee that has to approve stuff, and then there is a Compliance Committee that ensures any un-approved modifications and/or other HOA violations are reported. You can have a one-off report, like when someone ratted on Sue for having too many pots in her front yard. One morning she saw some guy, a stranger, stop his car, jump out to take a picture of her yard, then zoom away. A few days later, she got a letter from the Compliance Committee with the stranger’s photograph attached and then a whole bunch of presumably sane adults engaged in a protracted argument as to whether a so-called “strawberry pot,” which consists of multiple openings for plantings but has one single base, counts as seven pots or as one.

 

Sue won the Battle of the Strawberry Pot, but when Compliance did a sweep of the neighborhood a few months later, she got dinged for having an illegal palm tree and there was no getting around that. Sue’s a plant person and she’d put this palm tree in front of one of those electrical (?) boxes every fifth house or so has in their yard. While she’d met the regulations in terms of the personal space the box required, the plant itself was apparently on the HOA’s no-fly list and so it had to go. Sue couldn’t bring herself to destroy the plant, and I’m a soft touch, so under the cover of darkness, Sue dug up the palm and put it in a pot and wheeled it on a dolly over to my mom’s house where we hid it on their back patio until I closed on my house and we muscled it into a car and moved it into my living room, where it has been ever since.

 

Obviously, a person can’t have just one plant, so between not knowing what the right, non-one, number is and the many, many trips to Lowe’s I’ve making, things have kind of spiraled out of control. I killed two ferns today, like just pulled them out of their pots and put them in a trash bag, straight up murder, but even with those two guys down and the recent loss of a succulent who just flat out gave up and died, I’m still sitting at 46 house plants. And that doesn’t include the herb seedlings currently struggling mightily against my ineptitude (apparently I was supposed to cover them with saran wrap?) or the cuttings I have so optimistically arranged on my kitchen counter. (Note to self: there is literally ZERO natural light in the kitchen. Move those things.)

 

So, this is me these days. I’m going around the house with my spray bottle, hovering over each of my 46 plants in turn, smushing and eating every gnat I can catch, and yesterday I had too much wine and ordered 30 Tillandsia off the internet. What am I going to do with 30 Tillandsia? Your guess is as good as mine. There are plenty of boxes I could occupy myself unpacking, but I shoved them all into this one room I don’t use, largely because it is full of unpacked boxes, and have spent my time off from plant patrol assembling and installing these extremely elaborate, crystal-encrusted, bedecked and bedazzled light fixtures. On the pro side, I am now confident doing home improvement projects that involve wiring; on the con side, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing when it comes to home improvement projects that involve wiring. On the pro side, it’s starting to look like Versailles in here; on the con side, I have come to covet my neighbor’s ladder, it’s one of those multi-function “Giant” ones and I borrowed it to install a particularly extravagantly crystal-draped fixture in the stairwell and I have been in love ever since.

 

A global pandemic is a pretty good excuse for a major life change, so I’m glad I didn’t waste this opportunity. That said, this is a pretty major life change and there are moments where I am still amazed that I am now my OWN itinerant super and creepy/scary handy person. I mean, have I long fantasized that I would one day sit my home office, gazing out over the dozen or so plants I can see without turning my head, eating gnats and listening for the beep of my very own dryer? Did I always know that one day I would have a favorite ladder, that I would look forward to the satisfaction that comes from a well swept garage?

 

That’s a no to everything except for the dryer part: for fifteen years it has been my most fervent dream to have my own washer and dryer and use them whenever I want, without having to leave the comfort of my home, without having to pay for the privilege of loading my sheets and underwear into a machine most recently occupied by who knows WHAT, without having to drag around one of those laundry carts that always have an inch of hair and other muck wrapped around every wheel. So much of what has happened in the past few years has been an absolute nightmare, but at least this one little dream of mine has come true.

 

P.S. Let’s not jinx anything, but it’s been at least 10 minutes since I last saw/smushed a gnat, so maybe there is hope for better things to come? (Not for the gnats, of course. The gnats are all going to die.)  

 

P.P.S. The ferns had these stubbornly yellow underbellies and at first I was just trying to separate the gnat-attracting dying yellow parts from the green parts and then things kind of went sideways so, spider plant cuttings my sister brought me? Tapping you guys in to become #47! Good luck, friends. You’re gonna need it.