My mother has a thing about flies. Screens on all windows, and airconditioning so she does not have to open them.

We, living across the street from a pig farm, find her a source of merriment in this respect.

She has always been like this. I have memories, as soon as I was big enough to swing a swatter, of richly harvesting praise by standing at the south wall of our house, between the scratchy juniper and the siding, swatting legions of flies.

I was reminded of all this when my wife told me this morning that our youngest daughter had killed 18 flies yesterday, together with her grandfather.

I mean, of course, that her grandfather was helping her kill the flies. And not, you know.

That will be a cherished memory of childhood someday. Like my memory of swatting flies at the back of my childhood home is. Ray Bradbury wrote a story, it might be in the Martian Chronicles, and it might not, about an intelligent house going on about its business after a nuclear catastrophe. The only characters are the house, making breakfast and so on, and a radiation-sick dog. The family members were all burned into the siding, where they remain, as silhouettes, by the blast. When I imagine that story, I imagine the back of my childhood house where I was swatting the flies.

When we were visiting the relatives a week or so ago, a fly flew by in the cool air of my mom’s house and I remarked, “Gee, you sure don’t have many flies” and my mother spent the next 15 minutes chasing that single fly. This time of year, we eat breakfast with flies crawling around our faces like those dazed people you see on CNN sometimes.