I have a problem.  My problem is that very frequently, when I pull my sweaters out of a drawer or box to wear them, they have little holes in them which are unfailingly situated in such a way that when I wear the sweater, they end up in a place where the hole can be seen by anyone from anywhere, including space.  My wife tells me that these holes are the result of moths, which supposedly climb inside my drawers and clothes boxes and gorge themselves on cashmere and wool until they either become a caterpillar, or just stay a moth and figure out some way to weasel out of the box, or die in the box and disappear.   Since this manages only to happen to me, and because in all the times it’s happened, I’ve never seen a single moth, or even a single remnant of their visit there is a 50% chance my wife is nibbling them herself, but since I’ve never seen any evidence of that either, I took action.

Last week I got about eight sweaters back from the dry cleaner where they had been for approximately four months, which was about one week less than the average time I leave things are the dry cleaner.  I usually leave my clothes at the dry cleaner because I can’t stand to spend $78 for someone to rub chemicals all over my shirts in some unnamed location.  This time, though, I partially left them there because I knew they were mostly sweaters and I figured that the moths would never find them.

Before I brought them home, I went on the internet to research solutions to my problem.  The first was the simple solution of buying a cedar chest, into which I could put my sweaters, which the site claimed would solve my problem, unless the moths had already laid eggs on my sweaters, in which case, they would eat all of my sweaters and I would own a cedar chest.  This seemed a little excessive, so I investigated a second option, which was to place something that smelled like cedar, into a box or closet, which was supposedly going to stop the moths from entering because, according to the website moths “hate” the smell of cedar more than they hate being ugly and having roughly the consistency of tissue paper.

The idea I chose was to go to the pharmacy and purchase 16 ounces of mothballs.  I had smelled mothballs on many occasions, mostly on the uncomfortable wool blankets at my grandparents’ house.  I assume this was the case because moths either intentionally prey on older people, or more likely, because old people’s parents were alive when moths were much more of a problem and told them stories about how in the 1840’s, most people only had two articles of clothing, and that if a moth ate a hole in one, you might have to wait until you died of typhoid fever and came back as a human to get another one, which sometimes took a really long time if you had to come back as a lizard or other animal a few times first.

I brought the mothballs home, and opened the box in my kitchen before reading the directions.  The fumes that rose from the box caused my eyes to water and my lungs to cease their function until I buried my face in my shirt, which already smelled like my grandparents’ house after only four seconds sharing space with the fumes. The instructions on the box alleged that the fumes would keep moths away from drawers and clothes boxes for “up to three months”, but cautioned that if the moths were already in the box and laid eggs, they would be unaffected by your mothballs, in which case you’d have gross smelling sweaters that also had holes.

The “directions for use” suggested about 70 convenient uses for mothballs, most of which were focused on controlling or deterring some pest or another.  One of the first suggestions was to toss a handful of balls behind appliances to drive away mice.  Since a mouse recently entered our house through an opening in a screen that was supposed to be blocked by a cookbook that has a shirtless bodybuilder on the cover sporting a baker’s hat, I poured them like cereal behind the appliance and then went to address the sweaters.

When my wife returned she complained that the “whole house” smelled like mothballs.  Forgetting about the refrigerator issue, I told her I’d only placed them in the bedroom and we racked our brains to understand how the smell could be so pervasive in the kitchen when the items were safely locked in the bedroom closet where there was no smell at all.  For the next four hours we opened every window and ran every fan which succeeded in spreading the smell of mothballs evenly around the house.  Eventually, I recalled having placed a few behind the fridge and casually mentioned to my wife that this might be the problem.  She casually mentioned that I was an idiot, and then got me the vacuum so I could retrieve them.

I wouldn’t bet my life that I won’t have any new holes in my sweaters come October, but if I do, at least my wife will have a bad taste in her mouth.