Of Monsey and Pigeons
reposting a nice little piece from last week's nyt magazine [link] with several parts that felt like inside jokes between us. should we feel robbed?
Bitten to the Quick
By ABIGAIL MEISEL
SEPT. 19, 2014
In the spring of 2013, a family of pigeons nested in scaffolding outside my apartment building two blocks off St. Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. From the window of my first-floor apartment, I heard the cheeping of baby birds and affectionately observed their downy forms and tiny black-tipped beaks: my very own slice of nature.
But in May, when the squabs matured into fledglings and flew off, it seems that a horde of barely visible parasites that had been feeding off them — bird mites — needed a new blood supply. They launched an Old Testament-worthy invasion of the first-floor apartments. Relentless and nocturnal, the bugs robbed us all of sleep, raising painful red bites on my skin that were ringed with bruises. They appeared to prefer warm and damp locales: hair, nasal passages, ear canals, folds in skin and, most alarmingly, groins.
By Memorial Day, I looked as if I’d wandered out of a medieval pestilence. With more than 30 welts on my body, I began sleeping at hotels or couch-surfing a few nights a week to get a break.
The landlord called in exterminators. Dressed in hazmat suits, they fogged our apartments with insecticides for weeks. The tenants fled the fumes. The bugs are not known to survive on humans, yet they remained.
I continued to hope that each new brew of chemicals could rub out the mites in my roomy, light-filled prewar apartment — my refuge of five years. I’d escaped there from a smug New Jersey suburb where I’d been asphyxiating for a decade. The day after I signed the lease in Washington Heights, I returned to the bare apartment to sit in the sunlight that spilled onto the wood floors while I took in the childhood smell of radiator steam. Home.
But as that summer progressed, hope waned. A foxhole religionist, I was grateful to have a young rabbi, Etan, living across the hall. His wife, Yoni, and their six children had fled for the Orthodox enclave of Monsey after they noticed red marks on their baby’s skin.
Etan would come back to check on the apartment; one day, he found me sobbing in the first-floor hallway, sorting through ruined clothing. He invited me in for coffee, inexplicably cheerful. “How can we fight what we can’t control?” he said. I sat at his kitchen table crying, unable to answer.
He looked at me kindly. “You’re always welcome by us in Monsey,” he said. I cried even harder.
The point of no return came in late July. Nearly all the residents on my floor had fully or partly moved out of their apartments, and I followed suit, vacating for a house-sitting gig in a 1963 contemporary in Westchester, perfectly preserved down to the aqua tile, electric range and nifty built-in bar in the den. Aided by an ample supply of single-malt Scotch, I took stock. I had heard that the mites can travel with you, so I decided not to take any chances. Anything made of porous materials — textiles, wood and paper — had to go. My furniture, rugs, linens and clothing were all replaceable.
But my books — the library I’d been collecting since the age of 3 — how could I consign them to the back of a garbage truck? A childhood copy of “Charlotte’s Web” with my crayon markings in the front matter; the first-edition Sendak books my mother, who died when I was 16, had inscribed and read to me at bedtime; and perennials, books I turned to again and again for company, entertainment and comfort: Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth,” all of Updike’s Rabbit books; a copy of “Little Women” with a pastel frontispiece of the March girls singing around their piano. All were touchstones of my life. They deserved a dignified end.
A friend who was living nearby agreed to build a bonfire in his backyard. Two nights later I drove to his house with a carload full of books sealed in industrial-grade garbage bags. After he got a fire going, I tossed the books into the flames and watched them spark, catch fire and vanish into the night air.
The controlled destruction of my books brought finality to months of uncertainly and gradual attrition. As of that hour, I possessed nothing of value; yet, there I stood. Part of me hovered above the scene in shock. But I knew that I had the power to make meaning of the loss. That was my charge and mine alone. I looked at the pile of coals and ashes before me and decided to call it a beginning.
Bitten to the Quick
By ABIGAIL MEISEL
SEPT. 19, 2014
In the spring of 2013, a family of pigeons nested in scaffolding outside my apartment building two blocks off St. Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. From the window of my first-floor apartment, I heard the cheeping of baby birds and affectionately observed their downy forms and tiny black-tipped beaks: my very own slice of nature.
But in May, when the squabs matured into fledglings and flew off, it seems that a horde of barely visible parasites that had been feeding off them — bird mites — needed a new blood supply. They launched an Old Testament-worthy invasion of the first-floor apartments. Relentless and nocturnal, the bugs robbed us all of sleep, raising painful red bites on my skin that were ringed with bruises. They appeared to prefer warm and damp locales: hair, nasal passages, ear canals, folds in skin and, most alarmingly, groins.By Memorial Day, I looked as if I’d wandered out of a medieval pestilence. With more than 30 welts on my body, I began sleeping at hotels or couch-surfing a few nights a week to get a break.
The landlord called in exterminators. Dressed in hazmat suits, they fogged our apartments with insecticides for weeks. The tenants fled the fumes. The bugs are not known to survive on humans, yet they remained.
I continued to hope that each new brew of chemicals could rub out the mites in my roomy, light-filled prewar apartment — my refuge of five years. I’d escaped there from a smug New Jersey suburb where I’d been asphyxiating for a decade. The day after I signed the lease in Washington Heights, I returned to the bare apartment to sit in the sunlight that spilled onto the wood floors while I took in the childhood smell of radiator steam. Home.
But as that summer progressed, hope waned. A foxhole religionist, I was grateful to have a young rabbi, Etan, living across the hall. His wife, Yoni, and their six children had fled for the Orthodox enclave of Monsey after they noticed red marks on their baby’s skin.
Etan would come back to check on the apartment; one day, he found me sobbing in the first-floor hallway, sorting through ruined clothing. He invited me in for coffee, inexplicably cheerful. “How can we fight what we can’t control?” he said. I sat at his kitchen table crying, unable to answer.
He looked at me kindly. “You’re always welcome by us in Monsey,” he said. I cried even harder.The point of no return came in late July. Nearly all the residents on my floor had fully or partly moved out of their apartments, and I followed suit, vacating for a house-sitting gig in a 1963 contemporary in Westchester, perfectly preserved down to the aqua tile, electric range and nifty built-in bar in the den. Aided by an ample supply of single-malt Scotch, I took stock. I had heard that the mites can travel with you, so I decided not to take any chances. Anything made of porous materials — textiles, wood and paper — had to go. My furniture, rugs, linens and clothing were all replaceable.
But my books — the library I’d been collecting since the age of 3 — how could I consign them to the back of a garbage truck? A childhood copy of “Charlotte’s Web” with my crayon markings in the front matter; the first-edition Sendak books my mother, who died when I was 16, had inscribed and read to me at bedtime; and perennials, books I turned to again and again for company, entertainment and comfort: Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth,” all of Updike’s Rabbit books; a copy of “Little Women” with a pastel frontispiece of the March girls singing around their piano. All were touchstones of my life. They deserved a dignified end.
A friend who was living nearby agreed to build a bonfire in his backyard. Two nights later I drove to his house with a carload full of books sealed in industrial-grade garbage bags. After he got a fire going, I tossed the books into the flames and watched them spark, catch fire and vanish into the night air.
The controlled destruction of my books brought finality to months of uncertainly and gradual attrition. As of that hour, I possessed nothing of value; yet, there I stood. Part of me hovered above the scene in shock. But I knew that I had the power to make meaning of the loss. That was my charge and mine alone. I looked at the pile of coals and ashes before me and decided to call it a beginning.
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