Schuetz

"Mom?" my daughter whined at the breakfast table. "I think there's a louse in my milk." Before this month, I would have thought she was referring to her brother. But recently, we've all lived a little bit of history that I would rather have simply read about. Head lice invaded our home, or rather, our heads.

Since I started my monthly "Living History" column by talking about bedbugs, I guess its not a real stretch to move onto the topic of lice. Im actually glad the insect invasion in our home was the latter rather than the former, which are much more difficult to eradicate. But it still hasnt been much fun, especially for my daughter.

It all started with an itchy head. Okay, it obviously didnt start there, but thats when we noticed it. My head was itching, but my husband didnt see anything. And then one morning as I was combing my daughters hair, some of it crawled away from the comb. I couldnt be sure of what Id seen, but since her hair usually doesnt move that much, I knew it was something out of the ordinary. I took her to the school nurse. She identified white nits in her hair, which are the egg casings left by an earlier batch of bugs. These were more than an inch away from her scalp, which meant her hair had grown considerably since the eggs were laid. The lice had been there for a while. Their color ranges from translucent to light brown, so they really did look like crawling bits of my daughters ash blonde hair.

It was time to get serious. The nurse gave us lice-killing shampoo and we rushed home to douse our heads. From what I could tell, this had virtually no effect at all on the little buggers. I was able to remove several with the fine-tooth comb and they were noticeably not killed. Not even ill. So I went online and read everything I could find. It seems that lice are developing a tolerance for traditional treatments, so the only pesticides that work are the prescription-strength ones. I started trying folk remedies, one of which is to suffocate the lice with olive oil or mayonnaise. A Harvard study revealed that lice immersed in olive oil for two hours will drown. So I poured oil all over my head, put on a shower cap, and struggled for two hours chasing a puppy around the house, trying to answer the phone, etc. with oil running down my face. At the end of two hours, I combed three or four lice non-suffocated lice out of my hair. The next day I tried mayonnaise. On my daughters hair, I used globs of thick conditioner. Lice apparently do not need to breathe very often.

But what finally gets them is all the combing. We ordered a Lice Meister comb (a name so good, I could not possibly have made it up) and gradually combed all the baby, teenage and adult lice out of hair. Every day examined my childrens heads, the nurse examined them, my husband examined them and we all saw nothing. Yet we combed, there they were, wriggling in the tines.

Not anymore. Were done for the moment. Of course, well always have to keep checking now, because theyre much more prevalent than I had realized. The nurse said theyre common in Europe and no one seems to get upset over it. So if theyre common now, imagine how much more they were around in an age before we could wash their eggs out of pillow cases and vacuum them off the sofa. One thing is for sure-- in my future books, my characters will scratch their heads a lot more often.

Kate Dolan writes fiction and non-fiction on a variety of topics, but her great love is history, particularly early American history. She holds a law degree from the University of Richmond and an interdisciplinary degree from Catholic University and currently resides in a suburb of Baltimore, where she is ideally situated to drag her husband and children to an endless array of historical sites. You can learn about her books and read her "Living History" articles each month at http://www.katedolan.com