’Tis the season . . . for wasps to come in the house from the fireplace. It’s a bad time for them and for us. More specifically, it’s a bad time for me.
I have a fear of stinging insects dating back to when, as a toddler on my grandparents’ driveway, I stepped on a bee with my bare foot and it stung me between my toes. I was holding my grandmother’s hand, and when I screamed, she swatted at the dazed bee buzzing around her leg and took me inside. There, she pulled the tiny stinger out with tweezers and dabbed the puncture with some concoction that included vinegar. (I believe that also was the day I developed a lifelong gag reflex to the smell of vinegar.)
Now, every fall as the weather begins to get cooler, wasps come in the house from the fireplace. Their origin is a large annual nest outside the mesh and under the protective cover of the chimney cap. There’s obviously a hole in the mesh that allows them to get through and come down. Then for a few weeks, they come into the den and head for the kitchen. They’re “drunk and dumb,” as I like to describe them, because they mostly just bounce along the floor, windows and walls until they land and seem to wait to be swatted.
They’re not especially aggressive in their fall drunkeness, and yet their presence triggers my fear and the battle is on. Armed with a step stool and fly swatter, I follow them around making wild swings that miss and rile them up or direct hits that send them to the wood floor where they’re hard to see among the knotholes and blemishes. Sometimes one will fly up over the top of the cabinets, never to be seen again.
I’ve tried different strategies to stop the invasion, including shooting wasp spray up into the flu or having our exterminator blow his special dust up there. Some years I’ve sealed the fireplace shut with black plastic and tape that matches the black marble tile. One year I bought a telescoping aluminum pole and knocked down the wasp nest, while last year I made a net frame to cover the opening of the fireplace. I’ve done all that and still the wasps come down the chimney and spark my fear.
This year the exterminator dusted early, and after the first two wasps came in, it was time for something new. I lit a fire in the fireplace and after it flamed, I opened the damper and it rained dead wasps onto the gas logs, which means the dust worked. I let the fire burn a few hours, even though it was 80 degrees outside, but after I shut it off, wasps began coming in again. So, I sprayed again and deployed the net and started swatting the wasps that dared to fly or crawl into the room.
The only thing I haven’t tried, which probably would solve the problem once and for all, is to replace the chimney cap with one that has unbroken mesh. It’s 32 feet up there above the second-floor roof and only accessible from the first-floor roof with its steep pitches and valleys. Which means I’m not going to do that myself, because my fear of falling is greater than my fear of getting stung.
I know my fear of getting stung is irrational because I’ve never been stung in the house and I can’t remember the last time I got stung outside. And regardless of what we do or don’t do, the invasion will naturally end. The wasps that don’t come in will go wherever wasps go in the winter. Even if I did get stung while battling them, I know it wouldn’t hurt as much as my memory recalls. And I don’t have to worry about the vinegar gag reflex because I can’t smell vinegar now thanks to chemo and radiation for cancer in my sinus.
It makes no sense to have gone through that very real battle two years ago and yet today the wasp invasion scares me more. Maybe it’s a sign of “returning to normal” that a silly childhood fear is stronger than my fear of disease. But it’s also an example of how old fears can haunt us long after they should have been vanquished.
It’s sort of like the “butterfly effect,” where it’s said the flapping of a tiny butterfly wing can start a tornado hundreds of miles away. In this case, a tiny bee sting can churn up fears 60 years on.