Flea Market

My wife and I were talking the other evening about how fleas haven’t seemed to be a problem for years now and we wondered why. It used to be that if you had pets you ended up with a summer flea infestation problem. Before flea drops there were flea collars and before that there was flea baths. There was constant vacuuming, fumigating and animal bathing. It’s a wonder anyone ever wanted to keep pets in the first place during the old days.

I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen a flea on any of our pets or having a flea show up unexpectedly on my foot or arm.

We went on to talk about the old days of flea infestation. My story was of a house I move into when I was 21 years old. The previous occupants had two St Bernards that rarely ever went out side. The house was trashed with urine, fleas and dog slobber. You couldn’t see through the windows because of the slobber and there was a half inch of solidified slobber on every window sill that I had to remove with a putty knife. I had to gut the house and rebuild the interior to make it livable. Before starting anything I had to fumigate it with sulfur candles. You never hear of sulfur candles anymore.

My wife topped my story because when she and her previous husband were house hunting in the Surf Pines area, a realtor took them into this one house where they noticed the carpet moving. They walked through and the three of them became covered with fleas. They ran out the door as quickly as possible and spent the next half hour brushing fleas from one another.