An invasion from hell - a clothes moth infestation
Soon enough I found larvae, frazz and webbing in my bedroom, too. They had been breeding right under my nose on clothes the my clothes rack at the end of my bed, right above the laundry baskets with sniffy underwear. It slowly dawned on me that they were attracted to the pesky postmenopausal smell that I was struggling with. This made me paranoid, and I even thought they had laid eggs on the crotch of my pyjamas trousers when I found a collection of white specks there one day. I even mistook nail clippings for larvae. I was up in arms about safer ways of storing my dirty underwear until AI informed me that the eggs were invisible. They were also not likely to lay eggs on cotton. A friend had suggested using ChatGPT, and AI did help consolidate the confusing information from the web. For a naive first time user like me, it also ended up offering a kind of emotional crisis support.
The shock I experienced when I realised I was dealing with a problem of untold proportions was simply out of this world. I was struck with a gut wrenching sense of abject terror of a kind I had never known before. Of course I was sensitised because of my age and the medication I was on, but there were certainly genuine reasons to be worried. Not only had my personal space been so brutally invaded with an infestation that had spread to every room, but it also became obvious when I looked past the surface that I had been living in a somewhat unhygienic and undignified environment for many years. I had to admit that I was too slow and too unwell to manage a household of the current size by myself. That was even before I also had to take draconian measures to exterminate the moths.
There were signs of moth activity absolutely everywhere, and to begin with, I couldn’t even dream of containing the infestation. Each new day came with a dreadful sense of helplessness and overwhelm, but I had no choice but to soldier on. I had to take large doses of THC and whatever else I had at night in order to curb the hyper vigilance that followed in the wake of my discovery. All this happened at a point in time when I had just started to feel a little more physically stable and had managed to rationalise and reduce my drug intake somewhat. On the other hand, the medications I had put aside for a while, now allowed me to get full nights’ sleep, and this helped me devise some kind of plan of action to manage the moth situation. In the end, I started to get out of bed around 10.30 at night when a 2-hour window of opioid induced dopamine rush opened up. This was the only time of day I felt somewhat like my real, driven self, and was able to maintain a steady energy. These nightly rampages went on for weeks until I had gone through most of my belongings.
Of course I had recently bought a lot of wool that the moths loved, not least small oriental rugs and a lot of sweaters, and there were woollen items in every corner of the house. I even found gloves in pockets and in cupboards that showed signs of moth activity. The irony of having my attempts at introducing more animal derived natural products backfire in this way was not lost on me: you try and go ‘natural’ but nature doesn’t care and sends you its army of destroyers if it gets a chance. I had stocked up on clothes while fashion was favourable but there was too much, way too much. Some of my favourites were spared and some items were just about mendable, but I also lost a lot of money due to irreparable damage. The moths were sneaky, and when I chased them away from one place, they just found some other place with fluff they could use to spin their cocoons. The fact that they could fly around undetected at night and creep into pockets and other inaccessible spaces was enough to make me feel an altogether new kind of aversion towards the natural world. I also observed similar problems in my garden, where fungal diseases and destructive insects were having a field day that summer. I even got stung in the hand by a wasp when I tried to tame the Virginia Creeper that had exploded all over my shed.
I felt such immense disgust with the moth situation and all the things I had hoarded that I readily threw out almost anything that was being visited by the moths, including a few oriental rugs and several pieces of cashmere clothing. I manically washed the rest of my woollen clothes and blankets and bagged them. I ordered massive amounts of pesticides, especially tons of toxic moth balls for the bags and for my clothes drawers, and foggers intended for the fumigation of entire rooms. There was no other way that I could get the upper hand - I knew straight away that natural methods wouldn’t cut it. I tried to read up on the subject online but the information was wanting and I was struggling to understand the signs of moth activity very white dot I noticed was a potential egg and every bit of fluff or pilling was potential webbing - in fact, the excessive pilling of a limited spot on a garment often was. I even found genuine evidence on fluffy synthetic mop heads in the bathroom, and a live moth flew out of the storage basket when it was disturbed. It couldn’t have lived there for long without a source of keratin, but it was trying. In addition to the traditional signs, I also found clusters of sticky stuff on wool socks in a drawer and on the edge of an Afghan rug that looked like chia pudding, but I never could figure out whether it was really just accidental chia, or something else entirely.
I was thus raving for weeks at night like a restless and sweaty old apparition until I finally found the last active moth feeding site in my airing cupboard. I was forced to throw out my grandmother’s old blanket that I had left there and forgotten about. After this, it seemed as if the situation was finally under control, and my body was slowly able to let go of the stress. I was well aware the moths could easily reappear, and so I knew I had to stay vigilant forevermore, but I could only hope to catch them early and avoid another similar nervous breakdown. This was quite terrifying in view of the many woollen items I still had in my possession, and I dreaded getting them out of the bags when the cold season arrived. I couldn’t imagine living with bagged clothing, it was really too much. But at least the crisis had finally died down and I was finally able to think about other things again.
If there was one important thing that came out of the moth ordeal, it was the painful realisation that I wasn’t on top of my household chores. In fact, there were so many filthy corners and dust traps, so many piles of stuff, and so many things I was storing for a future that would never come because I was simply too old. But all the changes involved in decluttering and reorganising my space brought up the fact that the ongoing problems I had had with service providers were not finished yet. Sometimes something was wrong with an item I bought, for instance, the new sofa came with the wrong feet. A lot of the time, people just weren’t listening. The only keen listener around was now AI. Thinking about the potential source of the moth problem, I decided it probably originated with the Victorian library chair I had bought a couple of years ago. Despite the gigantic effort it took to organise, I managed to get the chair and an old settee professionally reupholstered with synthetic stuffing. And yet, the upholsterer ignored my instructions and made choices of her own that I wasn’t happy with, and so the delivery men were in and out of my house multiple times, causing me surplus stress and fatigue.
I threw out my old sofa and an exercise machine I was never going to use again, filled many bags with textile waste, and paid the council to remove it all. Even then, there were issues with one of the quotes for a few large parcels with several smaller bin bags bundled up together. “We know your parcels contain more than three items’, they argued and quoted an outrageous sum. I complained that they were uncooperative and unreasonable and that they encouraged fly tipping, which was a general point of contention with the local waste management, and the next day the sum had dropped. I was tired of the slow process of selling things on eBay so I donated a lot of things to a charity that agreed to pick them up. The decluttering, or rather death cleaning process, was a much needed one that I had been working on for a while, but it was simply taking too long, and now it was massively speeded up by my sudden hatred of material things: I was fearful and sick to my stomach but the panic fuelled me and basically lit my arse on fire. I didn’t achieve the minimalism I now longed for but at least I was more conscious of the hidden aspects of my awkward home environment. I also had to try and organise my space as quickly as I could so that I could perhaps finally pay a professional cleaner to deal with the deep cleaning of spaces I myself was unable to manage. I dreaded having anyone touch my things and introduce alien cleaning routines, but it would soon be necessary.
