Read on if you dare! This moth hater blog was my first article to be rejected by Thrive Global, no doubt because of the Yuck Factor. My other submissions were all accepted. Having been up close and personal with clothes moths, I was intrigued to hear about a gay solution to get rid of them. The Natural History Museum in London has been tricking male clothes moths into attempting to mate with other males rather than females by using bait that coats them with female pheromones. Moth larvae had been munching their way through many of the museum’s prized exhibits. This “Pheromone Destruction System” apparently halved the museum’s moth population. I wondered how they worked that out. Was somebody employed to painstakingly count each one? I’m not a fan of pesticides but was amused by the name of the pest management company in Winchester, England that had developed the system—Exosect. It reminded me of those Exocet heat-seeking missiles, only here the missiles were pheromone-seeking moths.

So why do I hate moths? When I lost my hair during chemotherapy for breast cancer, I chose wigs made of artificial fibers as wigs made of real hair are much more work to take care of and hotter to wear, as well as considerably more expensive, especially if they are hand-knotted. I was glad I didn’t go for human hair. Digging around in a plastic container of shoes to search for some warm slippers, I discovered that a load of clothes moths had decided to do some empire-building and had colonized sheepskin slippers that I hadn’t worn for five years or so. Scores of maggot-like white larvae spilled out all over the carpet as I lifted the slippers out of the container. Aaargh! Maggots and chemo—a perfect combination—clearly I needed to battle moths to prevent me getting bored with battling cancer. The larvae feast on anything with keratin—in particular animal hair, fur and feathers. I even found the pests on some Beanie Baby bears—Princess, Erin and Peace, which were worth a small fortune in their 1990s heyday but are pretty valueless now and can be found for a few bucks each on eBay. Who knew that we should have given the kids Swiss Francs instead? The bears were in the container right next to the slippers. I threw away the slippers, but since the Beanie Babies appeared to be made of artificial fibers, I squished them into a self-sealing bag and stuck them in the freezer for a couple of weeks to kill whatever might have remained on them after vacuuming. A human hair wig would have been an acceptable nursery for a moth mom. The idea of my wig turning into a variant of Medusa with tiny wriggling white larvae all over it was to say the least, a trifle unappealing.

Once I noticed the moths in the house, I started to find them everywhere. I think they had originally come from a second-hand suit that one of my sons had bought from a thrift shop for a job interview. He obviously did not realize that the suit was already inhabited. When I moved a bookshelf away from a woolen carpet, a swarm of moths flew out from underneath it like a plague of locusts. I had the carpet taken out and replaced with plastic laminate. My favorite woolen sweaters were full of holes. They were filed away in the trash can. And I didn’t need to eat my hat—a wonderful old-fashioned fur hat I’d got in China in the 1980s had completely disintegrated, leaving a trail of animal hair on the floor as I carried it to the bin. I was loath to resort to mothballs. I can’t stand the smell of them. Since I was being treated for cancer, a more important consideration was the fact that mothballs are usually made of naphthalene or paradichlorobenzene. Both of these chemicals are supposed to be neurotoxins and carcinogenic, but I hadn’t found any natural methods to be very effective. So when I got a lovely scarf and hat made of lamb’s wool as a Christmas present, I stored them in the freezer because I was so paranoid about the moths. When I would first put the scarf and hat on, they were a bit cold to wear until my body warmed them up.

It wasn’t my first run-in with these pesky pests. Their cousins had already invaded my home in the past. After my father died some years ago, I remember returning to my house after spending several months away dealing with his affairs. Opening my kitchen cupboard, hundreds of pantry moths flew out, like bats from a horror movie. Moths and moth larvae were in almost every container inside the cupboard. They were even nestled inside the screw tops of my glass spice jars. These were moths with eclectic tastes in ethnic food—curry, tamari, South American black quinoa and Bhutan red rice were among the offerings that they enjoyed. I had to throw away the entire contents of the cupboard and thoroughly clean the shelves inside. But at least I had succeeded in relocating all those moths to the garbage can and they had left my hats alone.