GUEST COLUMN: Fleas stayed with me all through the winter

By Sally Stang
   It’s 2 a.m. and I am vacuuming the cat. My cat, Ollie, has fleas … again! Luckily, he loves being Dustbustered or I would be typing this with one bloody hand now.
   By my reckoning, ‘tis not the season for fleas. No, they are not early this year — they have just never completely gone away since last autumn! They stayed with us (me, the cat and the apartment) all through the winter and have not abated.
   My apartment is one big trampoline for these little terrorists, who wait, cocked and loaded, then spring with a BOING like well-trained assault troopers, finding purchase on woman and beast with their bristly, barbed grappling hooks.
   Ollie has become their TV dinner and by intimate proximity, I have become their TV-watching dinner. We are the “Itchy and Scratchy Show” every night without “The Simpsons” or commercial interruption.
   I am puzzled. After multiple flea treatments on the cat, adding garlic to his food (gak!), and three gas-bombings in the apartment in the autumn, they stuck around all winter. For some reason, these wee, insufferably annoying vampires did not get the memo to head south for the winter or hightail it to their little flea caves to hibernate.
   And, although they have decreased a lot since last summer when they first arrived (it was a dry winter and they prefer humidity), they are like the proverbial no-good, belching brother-in-law bum who gets under your skin and has found a permanent home on your couch.
   This isn’t my first time at the flea circus, my friends. I’ve owned a few cats, so I do know about bug infestations and what you are supposed to do. In addition to numerous bombings, I’ve washed clothes I haven’t worn in ages (check!) and my bedding (check!) and curtains and cushions and rugs (check, check check!)
   Oh, how I have vacuumed! With a crevice tool, I might add. Gasp! In my world of voluntary slobbery, the only thing more maddening than fleas is enforced, repetitive cleaning chores. (Pun ahoy! Vacuuming sucks!)
   Combing Ollie (for what seems like hours) has become a nightly routine and a boon to pet/person bonding. The pet loves it (I’ve accused him of soliciting fleas, just to get my attention), but this person is finding it exasperating.
   All of this contact with fleas has led me to do some scholarly research (OK, Wikipedia) into their mini-lives. They always say to know your enemies … and, I hate to say it, but my enemies are rather intriguing!
   For much of history, human beings of all classes have been intimate with the flea. How lucky we are — compared to our itchy, welt-riddled, bubonically plagued forefathers — that we have a choice to be flea-ridden as a by-product of having pets, rather than an inescapable fact of life.
   I read that women once wore special flea-catching jewelry (ew!). And that people way-back-when wore fur on their coats, not just for warmth, but as flea traps. Also, the lapdog became popular, not so much as a companion, but to divert the owner’s fleas! To be honest, I’ve done that too. “Land on him, not me!” Shh, don’t tell Ollie!
   I must confess, the description of the flea’s reproductive life (and organ) sounds particularly intriguing! A single act of copulation can last three to nine hours. It is, as zoology author Richard Conniff said, “an act worthy of an epithalamium sung by a chorus of virgins.”
   This called to mind for me, back in college, a boyfriend who successfully wooed me by looking me in the eye and saying, “We have a flea between us.”
   As I stared at him blankly, he presented me with a famous love poem called “The Flea” by John Donne: “Marke but this flea, and marke this / How little which thou deny’st me is / it sucked me first, and now sucks thee. / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.”
   I guess I can say the same thing to Ollie — “We have a flea between us” — but alas, my feline boyfriend, I am not wooed, (scratch, scratch) I am not wooed.
    Sally Stang lives in Lambertville with her tuxedo cat, Ollie Vanderkitty.