He was totally unaware of how to handle these types of situations. The best thing to do was to have the whole household treated. Since Hannah had just been at our house the previous weekend she warned us that we might have been exposed. She was calling to let us know that our cousin Hannah had been sent home from school with lice. One afternoon, during a late lunch of macaroni and cheese, we received a rare call from our aunt Mel. When we went back to our mom’s house for our week-long custody she would stay with my dad turning our “new” house into a home by helping him buy kitchen accessories, properly stocking our pantry and (doing a really terrible job at) decorating.
She would always bring a sense of order to the place helping us clean it up, making dinners and exploring the farm with us. He was just a year shy of the divorce with my mom and was freshly obsessed with his newest catch–a fun blonde named Beverly. We spent weeks cleaning this house, which soon became the backdrop for a very brief portion of my childhood.ĭuring the fly house years my dad was just beginning to get used to his bachelor life-style.
The flies must have bred during the previous summer and died the winter that we moved in. There were dead flies on the counters, dead flies in the bathtub and dead flies on the windowsills. We called this house the fly house, because when we moved into the house it was completely covered in thousands of dead flies. All that was left was a dilapidated barn, rusting farm equipment, my cousin’s goat that bleated in a backyard pen and miles of fields that stretched out into the middle of nowhere. It was a beautiful two-story house built on a farm that was once the livelihood for my great aunt and uncle, but had since been abandoned.