The mold-eating hysteria — Avril's signature terror of spoilage and filth

pivotal · March/early April ~1997 B.S. (Weston MA)

• When: ~March/early April B.S. (Hal ~4-5; the Weston home, before E.T.A.), per scene 002's dateline
• What: Child Hal comes out into the Weston garden with a gnawed patch of green-black basement mold in his palm, saying "I ate this." Avril — who "feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth" — reaches out in maternal reflex, then freezes as she identifies it, and erupts into a circling hysteria, running plumb-straight martial laps just inside the garden's string border screaming for help. Orin re-narrates the same scene to Steeply years later (n234) as a set-piece of the Moms's "four horsemen": "enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness," with a hidden fourth (see event 9). The scene is the founding image of her OCD/hygiene apparatus.