Bed Bugs

We shopped at a discount store this morning.  I found a wonderful winter blue cotton sweater with snowflakes across the front.  Land's End.  Good stuff.  But...I wasn't taking any chances on bedbugs so I threw it into the dryer with a load of dark clothes.

My friend and helper, Tutu, told me that one of her clients had bedbugs and she couldn't go there for three weeks.  Imagine that.  They brought them home from a motel on a trip.  She said that the exterminators had to heat the house up so hot and so long that it killed all the houseplants...and the bedbugs. One might think it would peel the paint off the walls.

My Mumu had all the legs of her beds in cans of kerosene before DDT came along.  The cowboys in the 1800's and early 1900's had more experiences with bedbugs than they could stand.  Did you ever hear of the bull pens at the hotels in the shipping towns?  Early day motels got the blame.

So today I get the poem about bedbugs from the Nebraska State Historical Society.