Anticipating that cozy picture, we began to prepare the hearth. We have learned the hard way to make sure the canna fumaria (flue) is open before lighting the kindling. Haven't we all experienced the moment, as smoke begins to form layers in the room and are eyes start to sting, when we realize the flue is still closed?
This flue usually opens easily by releasing a chain attached to the wall. We pulled. Nothing happened. We tugged. No movement. We jiggled the chain. Nada. I said if we worked on it we could surely coax the thing to open. Then we noticed a small pile of dirt at the back of the hearth. Were our eyes playing tricks or was that pile of dirt moving?
I've posted before about the learning curve of city people like us having to deal with creatures encountered in the country (wild boars, snakes). We are used to the occasional sound of pine martens on the tile roof at night, when it seems like a roomful of furniture is being moved above our heads. We recognize pheasants strolling along the road. I used to scream upon sight of a tiny bat outside in the twilight hours, but once assured they were not vampires, I now barely notice them. We were not prepared, however, for what we discovered in the hearth.
NOTE: If you are squeamish you should skip over the next part.
Our eyes were not playing tricks. The little collection of dirt was teeming with tiny white larvae. You could call them larvae if want to shield yourself from the truth, but I think they were, dare I say it aloud? Maggots. The larvae of flies. John was stoic. I screamed. Then gagged.
We shoveled them into a heavy plastic bag, sealed it and took it outside. Then we sprayed the hearth and sealed it off. I sent an emergency text to Ivo, our savior who looks after the property.
If anyone tells you that Italian workers are unreliable about showing up or repairing things, let us talk to them. Ivo arrived bright and early this morning with a team of workers who are coincidentally constructing a new fence for us. All of their energies were focused, however, on the stuck chimney flue and why there had been live larvae in our hearth.
Since we had not built a fire in the hearth for one year, they surmised that a dead bird may have been trapped in the chimney. Thus the larvae. They also thought there might be a nest on top of the flue. They did not find any dead animals, but they did find a nest as big as a briefcase. Calabroni (hornets). Huge ones.
They sprayed it with insecticide and then used the flexible chimney equivalent of a roto-rooter that pushed the nest down the chimney. Fortunately, the hearth was well-sealed in plastic because in releasing the nest, they also released hundreds of gassed hornets, all trying to get out. We watched in horrified fascination. Eventually they all died.
The workers cleaned up the mess and went back to building the fence.
We built a fire and speculated that if we had persisted in our efforts to open the flue last night, we might not have lived to tell the story. We learned that if one hornet is attacked, it emits a chemical that signals to all the others in the nest to attack. While we might have survived the bite of a few hornets, the swarms that would have descended on us might have been too much to survive.
We're looking it as just another chapter in our never-ending country education.
