Fruit Flies

My DH took his mom to her annual checkup today. This was a good time for me to go through her apartment and excise the expired food, recycle the long expired magazines, redundant notes she leaves for herself and then writes again, toss the no longer relevant notes from her community, etc. I was not ‘disappointed.’ Below is a not-exhaustive list of things that I tossed:

• The expected petrified avacado.
• 10 apples in 5-bags of two each. I tossed 6 apples as they were soft.
• There were at least 5 ‘boxes’ of mandarine oranges in syrup. Each box has 4 containers. Interestingly I couldn’t find an expiration date, but tossed three of them, as she’a clearly not eating them, but buying them reflexively, as I think she is so many things.
• 3 packages of what were once very nice cheeses. The one ex date I found was well over a year old. The other two felt like hockey pucks through their wrappers.
• Year old cottage cheese and orange juice.
• Open bags of coffee. She hasn’t made coffee in her apartment since she moved in. I left the sealed ones.
• An aged Gatorade.
• Year old cheddar goldfish crackers
• Various opened bags of nuts that were refrigerated, but out of date by various amounts of too long.
• Bayer aspirin 10-years expired 😱.
• The incumbent garbage and recycling were in deep need of emptying.
• Additional recycling (a grocery bag full) of magazines from last year, half of the sudoku book (still leaving her plenty), many folded paper towel whose purpose we don’t understand, all the redundant notes to herself, including what to throw out from the fridge 😏, and dated notes about things that have already taken place… The additional trash was 1.5 plastic garbage bags.
• There was more…

After the rigamortus avocado, the next thing I found was the source of the fruit flies. All several thousand of them. A container of moldy raspberries sitting on the counter. Getting the first bag of garbage out of the apartment probably depressed the little fuckers as suddenly there was nothing to swarm about and feed on, but they had no way to get out. So, I spent the next almost 1.5 hours waving them away from whatever cupboard I needed to open. Fruit flies rank down there with mice on my life form appreciation list. They are interlopers that need killing and cleaning up, but in this instance I was not handling their annihilation. Ordering traps next. For us I would create them with apple cider vinegar in a mason jar. For a dementia patient, we need something a little more contained.

All of this is so terribly sad. My take on it is the moment is my mom-in-law leaves her apartment, sits at her dining room table, couch, or computer, and she forgets she has this infestation. And when she does see it she can’t grasp where it’s coming from or why it’s happening. 😢 She doesn’t realize it’s the raspberries or that raspberries are super fragile and should always be in the fridge. She used to know all of these things, and would have never put up with these flying punks in her kitchen prior to dementia.