Worse Than Cigarettes, Crack and Daytime TV

I went to bed, thankful that our bedrooms were on the second floor and confident that the floodwaters wouldn’t follow me upstairs.

I got into bed adjusting the covers and my life jacket.

I wasn’t comfortable around water. We could never understand why Bridget, our daughter, could love sailing so much when I had to take Dramamine before getting into the Jacuzzi.

I know kids with parents over 7 feet tall will be dunking by preschool, and kids with tiger moms will be brilliant and in therapy for the rest of their lives, but sailing?

While rolling over (challenging when wearing a bulky life jacket), I realized what I had passed on to the kids: my allergies.

I finally got to sleep listening to the soft sounds of the waves breaking downstairs.

Early the next morning I walked past our living room, ignoring the croaking of the frogs atop their lily pads and the lone fisherman in waders next to the fireplace. I searched out and asked (with a strong hint of begging) two able-bodied neighbors what we should do next.

And they are good neighbors. They reminded me of just what this country was built upon hundreds of years ago: friends helping friends harvest that crop, raise that barn and kill those pesky Indians.

But we all knew what was lurking in our living room.

Wes Craven was behind the camera, and this was something worse than Jason, Attila the Hun or Lady Gaga.

It was Mold and Mildew.

That’s right, Mold and Mildew—the real reason dinosaurs became extinct.

Oh, there are other deadly duos: Hitler and Himmler, Sturm und Drang (German, too, but not as bad) and Rodgers and Hammerstein (torturous, boring musicals).

But Mold and Mildew are silent assassins that slip into your respiratory system under the guise of innocent drywall, their ugly spores forming a rave in your lungs forcing you to cough up noxious, infected sputum and then, very much like the black plague, kill you.

Or something like that.

I’d rather be bitten in half by a great white shark.

My good neighbors and I jumped right into the lake and began ripping up the carpet (I was the only one wearing a haz-mat suit) and in no time at all we had huge, sopping chunks of carpet littering our front yard.

I thought of leaving the carpet there and maybe adding a Buick before remembering we weren’t in West Virginia.

One of the good neighbors vacuumed up the water (“vacuuming water” is an astonishing concept that I’ve always thought unattainable—much like splitting an atom or Simon Cowell being modest), while I ripped off the baseboards (a favorite nesting place for Mold and Mildew to spawn their pernicious brood!).

The drywall was mushy, and knowing very little about drywall, except that it’s a compound word, I called a drywall “expert” to come out and assess.

He was sympathetic to our position and gave us his professional opinion: “If I don’t remove this rotting drywall already festering with Mold and Mildew, you, your family, and all your distant relatives will be dead in a week.”

A bit skeptical but also hysterical, I agreed to pay for the immediate removal of the drywall and though thinking the cost of his kid’s college tuition was a bit high, I still felt responsible for saving June’s Aunt Pat on the East Coast.