A pest technician does not walk through a house. He walks around it, low, looking at the places nobody else bends down to see. Those places have a lot to say about the person inside.
My company controls pests and vectors in Itararé, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The work is mostly the same anywhere there are walls, warmth and food: an insect or a rodent wants in, and the house, without meaning to, has left a way. These six notes follow one perimeter walk around a house of the American kind, with a crawlspace, a two-car garage and a porch, because that is the kind of house the readers who asked for them live in.
Each stop starts with what I see at that point on the walk and why it matters for the job. Then it turns to the man who lives there, because every one of those six spots on the outside of a house touches a habit on the inside of it. There is nothing to buy on any of these pages, no remedy, no condition named. Where a note brushes against the body, it says so and hands the question to a doctor.
A screen the size of a shoebox lid under the bedroom, what moves through it at night, and the first breath of the morning.
Read stop oneA strip of daylight under the roll-up door, the wall a mouse follows, and the one door the man uses without ever stepping under the sky.
Read stop twoThe most honest record in the house, read by ants before anyone else, and the lid that tells the kitchen it is closed.
Read stop threeA pull-down ladder, a gable vent with a gap, and the warmth that leaks into the upstairs bedroom every summer evening.
Read stop fourA fixture crusted with wings, the bulb that draws fewer of them, and the only seat in the house with no screen in front of it.
Read stop fiveA dripping outside tap, the bucket that breeds under it, and the one tap on the property the man never drinks from.
Read stop sixWho signs these notes, why they are in English, how the domain earns its keep, what is held about a reader and the conditions the notes are read under are all written on the clipboard, one page.