Maggots

Before I left for the summer I pretty much emptied the kitchen closets. On the bottom shelf I had left some tightly sealed spices, a sealed can of VietNamese coffee that tastes and looks like coal dust and an opened pack of paper coffee filters. The first thing I did when I got home was to grab a filter and make a pot of coffee, using the coffee I had with me in the van. It tasted really bad. The next day I happened to look at the coffee filters and they were pullulating with maggots. Well to be honest they weren't actually pullulating, but I could see at least a dozen maggots creeping about merrily in their high rise with a view. I like the word pullulating. One rarely has a chance to use it. Anyway I am mystified. The closet doors were firmly closed, there is a backing of fake wood between the adobe wall and the shelves, so how did a fly get in? What did the fly lay its eggs on? The filters were the very cheapest from the Infamous Big Box Store, but surely they aren't manufactured from anything that a fly might consider an ideal nursery for beloved offspring? I scrubbed out the closet with straight bleach, but the mystery remains. Once my daughter found maggots in a bag of sugar that I had opened less than a week before ..... And once at work I found a true pullulation of maggots in the drain line from a blood gas analyser......... What is unsettling I guess is the thought that maggots are always in the wings waiting for us. I did hear on NPR - or was it BBC? - that surgeons are using maggots to clean wounds like they did in the good old days. And leaches are back too. I remember when Boots the Chemist carried leaches, but they did not display them out front. They must breed those medical maggots in a sterile environment one would hope. They wouldn't just scrape them off a handy road kill would they? Or from a pack of coffee filters? I did not photograph the maggots. Photography was far from my mind as I banished them.

I have returned to a green desert. What are usually dry red expanses of desert are now dense celebrations of wild sunflowers as tall and brilliant as their domesticated brethren, and the smell is wonderful. The cottonwoods and poplars and pecans are heavy with deep green foliage, and half dead trees along abandoned irrigation ditches are looking up hopefully.

Where is this post????? It is not showing up on my blog....................aauuugh