We didn’t get the memo about turning out the lights. So when we encountered our first termite swarm, predictable, so they say, in the month of May, I regretted having the automatic motion detector in the side yard.

It could have been a classic western new york snow squall, the kind that you see under the lights, hoping that school and work will be cancelled the following day. When they flew en masse, the light did what it was made to do, shine brightly, which attracted ever more of the small winged insects.

The termites, as well, were doing what they were programmed to do—emerge from the ground, fly for the few moments of life yet remaining in the hopes of mating on such a warm and humid night, with the the frogs beginning their second chorus, adding now a bass section.

It did not help to yell hysterically at the light. Windows, doors and screens do not fully keep them out of the home. They are too small, too much in heat. Too many of them get in.

It was the talk of the small community at St Rose the following morning. A number of them lay dead in the sacristy. An elderly man, accustomed to the annual invasion, said he just got under the covers till morning. “You turn out your lights,” he said.

“Not to worry,” they all say, it doesn’t mean, necessarily, that your home has become infected. It would be nice to delete ‘necessarily’. “You just vacuum them up the next day.” And the one following that. And every now and then, when I look down at the floor, or windowsill…