Last fall my house was suffering from a fruit fly infestation. I confess that I am not a good housekeeper, but I was perplexed about the source of these annoying little bugs. I put all the fruit in the refrigerator. I read that fruit flies can breed in very small amounts of standing water, so I went around the house and made sure there was no water anywhere. I didn’t even leave dishes in the sink with water in them. I checked the washtub in the basement. I scrubbed and cleaned and still the flies persisted! Finally, I gave up and decided I was going to have to learn to live with them.
Several months later I was looking for something that had fallen behind a shelf by the back door. YUCK! I found a plastic bag with the remains of a potato. It was crawling with fruit flies and was the perfect incubator for the pests! At last, the hidden source of my infestation. I ran that slimy little bag out to the dumpster.
My fruit fly dilemma reminded me that even if the surface of my life looks scrubbed and clean, sometimes there is hidden junk that is hard to pinpoint and eradicate. Maybe there is some bitterness that isn’t immediately evident beneath my smiling exterior. Maybe there is a grudge against a family member, and no matter how much I work on other areas of my life, it hangs on as nasty infestation.
Sometimes I need to look a little deeper and see if there are some areas below the surface that need cleaning.
This post was written by Carla Foote.
