February 28, 2015 – Key West, Florida, USA
“In addition to our wild chickens, the Conch Republic is special because of our architecture,” said the tour guide from the front of the bus. “We’ve got some special touches. If you look toward the right, at the ceilings under those porches, you’ll notice they’re painted sky blue. Any idea why?”
Sasha Sybrowski was listening intently from inside the bus. She whispered to her husband, Jeff, “Do you know why?” He shook his head like he did not know or really care.
“They’re blue to fool the bugs,” continued the tour guide. “Insects think they’re looking up at the sky, so they don’t want to crawl or land on that ceiling.”
“Oh, isn’t that clever?” Sasha said to Jeff. He tried not to react. He could already see the wheels turning in her head and did not want to encourage her.
“This is a great example of using science to work with mother nature instead of against her,” continued the tour guide.
While Jeff remained quiet, Sasha talked excitedly about the porch surrounding their new house back in Indiana. She was suddenly concerned about the bugs they might expect crawling around every inch of the porch.
When the tour was over, Jeff expected to visit the Key West butterfly museum and find the six-toed cats which hung around the Hemingway house. Sasha had forgotten all about those highlights, which they had read about in their tour book. All she wanted to do was walk up and down the residential streets, admiring the porches.
“I like the columns on that one,” she said to Jeff, after pointing out fifty other porches. “And look at the blue on the ceiling. A little paler than the others. Really charming, don’t you think?”
Sasha had used “charming” to describe all fifty-one of the porches she had seen. Jeff already knew what she was planning.
Their trip to South Florida was to celebrate their joint retirement as school teachers. It was the first February they could remember in which they were not in school as teachers or as students. They wanted to get out of the cold of Bloomington, Indiana and enjoy the Florida weather between the Christmas and Spring Break crowds.
Miami had felt too bustling but they had loved their stops along the Florida Keys. They unrolled the windows and drove slowly over the ocean on the Seven Mile Bridge. They stopped and sampled every key lime pie they saw advertised along the way. Compared to the slushy roads and frozen air in Indiana, it was easy to fall in love with the mild sea breezes.
Jeff bought a conch shell to remember the trip. He knew exactly where he was going to put it. The couple had moved into a new downsized house as part of their retirement and the shell would sit on a shelf next to the much reduced collection of books he had decided to keep.
Jeff tried to talk Sasha into buying some kind of souvenir. He thought maybe it would dampen her new obsession with porch ceilings and the inevitable painting project that came with it. No such luck. Sasha was not interested in trinkets to help her remember the trip, she wanted to recreate the little piece of Florida she liked the most.
Sasha’s interest in porches was not new. When they had shopped around for their retirement house, she had insisted on a wraparound porch on at least two of the house’s sides. She envisioned it as a place to sit in rocking chairs on a summer evening and watch kids chasing fireflies. It would also be the perfect spot for sipping lemonade and reading romantic novels.
When the Sybrowskis made the return trip to Bloomington, a wet and gray March storm surrounded their little house. Sasha stared at the house’s gray exterior and was dismayed by how closely it matched the clouds. At least the railings and support posts for her porch were painted a bright white. It was a shade that matched the posts in Key West, but she felt more sure than ever that a more drastic change was needed to capture a breezy, laidback, Florida porch ambiance.
Sasha had purchased two rocking chairs for the porch, but they had been kept inside, out of the wintery weather. Sleet was still falling from the Indiana sky when she dragged them out her front door and began a vigil for warmer weather.
“I think I see some blue sky coming this way,” she kept telling her husband, whenever he came out to the porch and found her wrapped in a blanket and sitting in one of the rocking chairs.
“What does the weather forecast say?” Jeff would reply.
“You can’t trust the forecast. They’re always pessimistic.”
When she was not on her porch waiting for the weather to change, Sasha spent time at the paint store. She returned with sample cards and held them out at arm’s length, imagining how her porch ceiling could look.
“They’ve got it figured out down in Florida,” she said to Jeff. “Working with nature instead of against her. I just like how that sounds.”
“Sure. Who wouldn’t?” replied Jeff.
“So why aren’t there blue porches in Indiana? Aren’t we smart up here? Or does it take a while for a good idea to catch on?”
“It’s a mystery to me too,” replied Jeff.
“Well, take a look at these paint cards. If you were a bug, which one would look most like the sky?”
“I don’t know. Which one only needs one coat? If I have to be painting a ceiling, I only want to do it once.”
Sasha did not like Jeff’s lack of enthusiasm. She was trying something that would make their home cuter and more livable. If Jeff was not supportive, she would simply do all the work herself and take all the credit.
“Don’t worry about the painting. I’m doing it,” Sasha told her husband.
She picked out a shade of baby blue paint from the store, along with a paint tray and roller. She dragged the step ladder from the garage to the porch and laid sheets of plastic on the floor to catch any excess drips.
“How warm does it need to be to paint?” Sasha asked Jeff, still waiting for the first sunny day since their return from Florida.
“I wouldn’t do it if it’s raining like this,” said Jeff. “You don’t want water splashing or dripping onto fresh paint.”
After a week of waiting, Sasha was on the verge of painting with or without the rain. Then the sun came out and the temperatures soared into the high 50’s Fahrenheit. It took her the entire day to get used to the paint roller, but she covered the entire porch ceiling in the new shade of baby blue. For the next two days, the temperature was warm enough that Jeff agreed to sit out on the porch for a few minutes at a time and admire her work.
“Looks pretty even to me,” said Jeff. “Kind of reminds me of a baby’s room. A baby boy, I mean.”
Sasha looked skeptically at the roof. Ever since finishing the first corner, she had worried the shade she had chosen was too light. Would insects recognize a subtle blue that looked more like a cloudy sky? Did they need a more obvious blue?
“I don’t know,” Sasha said to Jeff. “This might not be right. You should be thinking of the sky, not a baby’s room.”
The next day, she was back at the paint store shopping for deeper, richer shades of blue that insects could not confuse. She pulled the ladder back from the garage and laid down her protective plastic, just in time for another week of cold rain.
When she finally got the clear skies she was looking for, up went the sky-blue paint. As she applied it, Sasha looked back and forth between her ceiling and the surrounding sky to make sure they were a reasonable match.
“Pretty good,” Sasha said to herself. “If it could fool me, surely it’ll fool a bug.”
When Jeff sat in his rocking chair to admire the paint, he had to admit it was a less subtle color.
“If you close your eyes, look up, and then open them, does it feel like you’re seeing the sky?” asked Sash.
Jeff opened and shut his eyes, one at a time. “Well, I guess so. It also looks like a million blue M&Ms.”
“What? M&Ms?”
“I like M&Ms,” replied Jeff, trying to backtrack any perceived criticism. “Or maybe it’s more like a ceiling full of blue flowers.”
“The bugs are going to see sky,” Sasha insisted. “A charming sky.”
By the end of March, winter gave up on Indiana and let spring take over. All kinds of plants around the Sybrowski house began to bud, and if she looked carefully, Sasha could spot bugs crawling around the ground.
When she spent time out on her porch, she did not need as many clothing layers, and she kept an eye out for any insect action. She saw a few ants crawl up to the edge of the floor, but they were way too far from the ceiling to test its effectiveness. Sasha was too impatient to entirely let nature take its course, so she scooped up some of the ants and pushed them onto the top of one of the posts that held up the porch’s roof. The ants crawled back and forth looking confused, but they all eventually made their way down, away from the ceiling. Sasha took it as a good sign.
By the end of April, Sasha was out on the porch in short sleeves and encouraging Jeff to join her as much as possible. She kept a careful, hopeful eye on any bugs that got close. So far, she had not seen one crawling insect walk across the ceiling or one flying insect try to land upside down. She was sure her little slice of Florida knowhow was doing the job. She even felt like her obviously blue ceiling must be more effective than some of the subtler shades she had seen around Key West.
When the trouble started, it arrived overnight. Around the first of May, Sasha woke up to find a swarm of wasps buzzing around her porch. At the edge of the ceiling, where it was held up by the support posts, the wasps were building nests.
“Go away!” cried Sasha, as she swiped at the wasps with her broom.
They ignored her and she was forced to watch them through a window that overlooked the porch.
“I don’t get it,” Sasha said to Jeff. “Don’t they see the blue ceiling? Aren’t they fooled?”
“Maybe Indiana wasps are smarter than Florida flies,” said Jeff.
“You might be right,” replied Sasha thoughtfully. “We should think through this scientifically. Why are the Indiana wasps doing what they’re doing?”
Jeff shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I was just trying to be funny.”
“They’re building nests right where the ceiling meets the wall,” continued Sasha. “They must think the supports posts are like trees because they can see sky on both sides. If you’re a wasp, that must be where you want your nest. But Florida doesn’t have insects like that. We’ve got to think like the Indiana insects and do something different.”
Jeff looked back at Sasha with a dumbfounded expression.
“We’ll think scientifically and do an experiment,” continued Sasha.
“Why don’t we get some wasp spray?” asked Jeff. “That’s scientifically formulated to get rid of them.”
“We need to work with nature, not against her,” said Sasha.
That afternoon, Jeff visited a home and garden center and bought the most lethal can of wasp spray available. Sasha headed to her favorite paint store with a gentler plan in mind. She looked over shades from every color in the rainbow, trying to decide on a color that would look unnatural to wasps. She did not want them feeling at home under her porch.
Sasha’s decision making process took a lot longer than Jeff’s. By the time she returned home, he had already blasted the wasp nests and swept away the remnants.
“You killed them?” cried Sasha, who was secretly happy she would not have to paint surrounded by stinging wasps.
“Yes, nice and simple,” replied Jeff.
“Fine, but in the long run, I want to work with nature,” said Sasha. She retrieved the ladder and plastic coverings and poured some of the new purple paint into the roller tray.
“Purple?” cried Jeff, when he saw the first patch of new paint on the ceiling.
“The wasps won’t recognize this color when they see it,” Sasha explained. “They won’t think our walls are a tree anymore.”
“Huh? What about the blue? What about the other bugs?” asked Jeff in a near panic over the growing purple spot overhead.
“We’ve got to think like Indiana bugs, not Florida bugs,” replied Sasha.
She kept painting, and when the entire porch was finished, she convinced herself it had the same kind of cute charm she was going for all along.
“It brightens things up a lot,” she said to Jeff. “When I’m out there I feel young and energetic.”
“I feel like I’m inside a glass of grape juice,” replied Jeff.
Sasha gave him a dismissive glare. “And we’re conducting a scientific experiment, remember? We might be revolutionizing how people deal with their bug problems.”
For the rest of the spring and summer, Sasha and Jeff watched for the return of more wasps. Sasha was obviously hoping they remained wasp free, but Jeff was torn. While he did not want wasps buzzing around his house, he also did not appreciate sitting under the only purple porch ceiling in the state of Indiana.
By Labor Day, not a single new wasp had shown up and Sasha declared the experiment a success. Any visitors to the house, or random strangers walking past, could not help but notice the purple ceiling. Sasha loved to explain to them the science behind wasp prevention and how it was only a matter of time before everyone in the Midwest was working with nature and painting their porches.
If Jeff had the chance to talk with any of their visitors in private, he shared his own theories about wasp prevention.
“You’ve got to blast them hard in the spring and take out their nests. If the chemical is strong enough, the smell will keep any new ones from coming back.”
If anyone asked him about the purple ceiling, Jeff would usually say something like, “I’ve gotten used to it. It could be worse. She could have picked a Minnesota Viking’s purple or a traffic cone orange. This is more like a lavender. Unless we get invaded by vampire bats with a taste for lavender, we’re probably stuck with it.”
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