The Moth of November

It's no secret in our family....I'm deathly afraid of moths. I used to have everyone buffaloed into thinking that I merely loathed them, but it is way more than that. It comes from growing up in a 100-year-old house...a house with lots of little nooks and crannies for moths to wiggle their way through into the house in the fall. They especially loved my room for some reason. On my wall was a huge photo of my dad as a baby. You know those old posed photos done by traveling photographers who dressed babies up in their christening dresses and posed them, sometimes on an antique-looking throne-like chair. The photo with the huge carved ornate, dark wood frame (another source of childhood oogies...the frame was covered with carved snakes!) and measured at least 3 x 4 feet.

I found a postcard size copy of the picture but couldn't find any of the huge photo in the even huger frame. Actually I have no idea who ended up with the monster picture, and I don't think I want to even know!


The moths loved to come in my room and fly around and around my ceiling light. Usually one but sometimes two a night. I would reach for something to swat it with and take a couple swings at it. About 1/4 of the time I was able to swat the moth and then had to find some way to pick it up and put it in the trash without touching it. Here comes the first oogie moth dance. Moth in trash, check. Dance done. If anyone in our house couldn't find a flyswatter, they knew to look in my room. I also had a good stash of magazines in there too,just in case someone made off with my flyswatter. The Saturday Evening Post or McCall's worked pretty well. The Reader's Digest and TV Guide were just too small and my big sister's Tiger Beat mags were too thin and flimsy.

Just after I climb back into my comfy bed and settle down with my book, moth's partner comes swooping into the room, flies a couple of turns around the ceiling light, and just as I swat at him, dives behind baby dad's picture. I rattle the frame, swat at the glass, sweep the fly swatter behind the picture, but the moth is nowhere to be found. I have to go to bed with a live moth IN THE ROOM WITH ME! I try sleeping with the covers over my head but that lasts about five minutes until I feel like I'm suffocating and have to come up for air. Listen....is that the soft bump, bump of a juicy moth body hitting the walls? What was that....something flew past my face! Turn on the light and find....nothing. Still do the oogie moth dance just in case.

Finally I fall asleep and dream of big gray wings beating at my face and trying to swoop me up. Then I wake up and feel a lump in my throat. No...couldn't be....swallow quick...gag....no oogie taste, but still, gag a few more times. Okay, we're up for the night. This is probably where my insomnia started....also my love of books that could take me away from the thought of dusty gray wings and fat, squishy bodies that you need a wet rag to clean the walls with after you swat them.

Now I'm grossing myself out again. This evening I spotted one of those small, dark, quick moths sitting on the wall behind the fridge but about 7 feet off the floor. I knew I couldn't reach it even with the fly swatter, so I called Tim in to take care of it. He is now 6'4" tall, so there is not much he can't reach. I wordlessly pointed at the moth on the wall and handed him the fly swatter. He just laughed and said he was wondering when I was going to notice it, but it wasn't a moth. "Then what is it?" I asked, "or don't I want to know?"

"It's a chocolate chip, and no, you don't want to know." (I don't!) He took the fly swatter but the fridge was too much in the way to reach the chip. I was holding a dish towel in my hand and gave it to him, saying, "You are supposed to be the champion towel snapper. Let's see you snap that chip down." He took a couple of half-hearted snaps at the chip but kept missing. He gave me back the towel when I booed him and told me to try. Now that wasn't just a chocolate chip on the wall....it was every moth that ever faked me out, that ever hid behind the picture, that ever crawled back out in the middle of the night to terrify a little girl. That moth was toast! It took me three whacks but suddenly the chip sailed off the wall to who knows where, because we couldn't find it again. In it's place is a divot in the wallpaper where it had been sitting....a reminder to all not to mess with a moth phobic, towel-snapping, angry woman!

The Wedding Cake

I was just flipping channels and watched a few minutes of "My Fair Wedding with David Tutera." The bride was getting her wedding cake from the supermarket and David was shocked. This reminded me of my first wedding and how we killed off or incapacitated all of the cake decorators in our small town with our cursed wedding cake.

It all began when we picked a lady on the recommendation of friends who had seen her work. We went to her house and looked at her photos and hired her to do our cake. A month before the wedding, her daughter called my mother to tell her that her mom had died that week. Okay, there was one more cake decorator in town and she agreed to do our cake. Two weeks before the wedding, she broke her arm and was not going to be able to do our cake.

Now what do we do? The only thing we could think of....we went to the local Super Value store and begged them to decorate our wedding cake. My aunt's brother-in-law happened to work in the bakery and agreed to do the cake on short notice. Whew! We were going to have cake after all!

The night before the wedding, we stopped at the Super Value to pick up the cake. Uncle Windy had assembled the whole thing in the bakery. I was pretty nervous about having to transport it in our little car the 30 miles to the venue. I needn't have worried about the car ride though, because Windy carried the cake out to the car for us and just as he was stepping over the doorstep of the bakery's outside door, he tripped and the cake went flying. Not one of the layers was salvageable.

Windy felt so bad about being the one to drop the cake (huh, better him than us!) that he offered to start baking right then and get our cake finished by the 10;00 a.m. wedding and even deliver it to us at the church. He did just that and this time brought the cake layers in separate boxes. I didn't breathe easily until it was stacked and stood for awhile, so we could see it wasn't going to fall down.

I do have pictures of the cake but haven't been able to find the album today. I did find one wedding picture though.

Yes, it's a Polaroid. We were poor and couldn't afford a professional photographer, so we ended up with whatever pictures were taken by family members. Don't we look scared? :)