There's a leak under the sink, rips in the roof, the ficus tree has fallen down, the car engine's leaking and now termites are eating our garage. Welcome to Arizona!
When we left our home in England we had been battling a plague of carpet beetles. These creatures fly in your windows during the warm summer months, lay their eggs in some dark corner, and the first you know about is when little holes start appearing in your carpet or your favorite clothes as the larvae start munching away. They'll continue to gnaw at your clothes – even cotton and artificial fabrics – till the spring comes when they fly out to the garden and the whole cycle starts over again.
But carpet beetles are wimps compared to the pests we find when we come to Arizona. Bugs eating our clothes? That's nothing. We'd only been here a few days when it was time for our annual termite inspection, and the guy called us out to look at something in the garage.
One of the wooden jambs on the garage door was rotten from the inside, eaten away by the termites. They'd come up from under the concrete garage floor and gone straight into the middle of the wooden support post, and chewed their way up. They're an invisible menace, impossible to detect until the wood and the paint start crumbling, looking like they do when rot sets in. The guy punched several holes in the wood with his screwdriver, showing that the blind little creatures had eaten their way up by a few feet. The post was going to need replacing, after treatment.
So back in England the carpet beetles are probably still tucking into our clothes, while here in Arizona termites are eating our garage.
