Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published Feb. 18, 2004

Time to burn this year

Thanks to Julius Caesar, 2004 is Leap Year. We have one whole day as an extra 24 hours. It has been that way since 46 B.C. when that extra day of Feb. 29 was intercalcated, which means added to the calendar, to make the calendar year correspond to the solar year.

That extra day every four years compensates for the quarter-day difference between an ordinary year and the astronomical year.

Every year whose number is divisible by four is leap year. But wait, there is a complication. Centennial numbers are leap years only when divisible by 400. I'm glad there are experts to tell us when this happens.

How about those people born on Feb. 29? Do they consider they were handed a raw deal? Do they only celebrate their birthday every four years? There must be a number of people in our community who were born on Feb. 29. How did your family handle that odd birth date?

I would enjoy hearing from you. Call me at 484-7801 or e-mail me at ebrush@frontiernet.net.

I would guess there will be a birth or two here this Feb. 29 and it would be helpful to give those parents an idea or two when they start explaining this strange quirk in the calendar as their child grows older.

For the rest of the population that extra day should be a treasure and handled in a special way.

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A headline made me itch! The big, black, bold letters screamed, "Bedbugs are back." It brought back bad memories. During WWII, I was a camp follower. As a newlywed, as long as my man was stateside, I was determined to be as close to him as possible. He was sent to Yale for a three-month crash course in radar, and I followed. There I met two other wives of men in the course and we found a cottage a short distance from New Haven on the Long Island Sound.

Natives told us that late spring was the coldest they could remember. For us that was bad because we had only a fireplace to heat the two-story house. Being practical women, we decided the only way to stay warm was for the three of us to share the double bed at bedtime. Betty was in her early months of pregnancy and was nauseous most of the time, and Jeanne was close to her delivery date so I became the middle of a sandwich.

Each morning I wakened with itchy red welts on my body. I was the only one affected. The old nursery rhyme ran through my brain, "Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite!"

After several nights we had to face the horror of the unspeakable and we stripped the bed. Sure enough we found the carcasses of many bloodsuckers. We used the light test, turning off the light and when we turned it on again live creatures were cavorting on the bed.

All those memories flooded back as I read that bedbugs are making a comeback after being almost wiped out of this country in the last part of the 20th century. Professional pest control exterminators became important to homeowners. Nothing lasts forever and Orkin reported a 300 percent increase in bedbug cases between 2000 and 2001. Those numbers have gone up by 70 percent each year since. This reappearance of the bedbug is blamed on the increase in international travel. All part of the global economy.

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday.