My daughter has been plagued by lice this year, something I thought was confined to the lower school. Seems lice don’t care what age you are, and if you have long lustrous hair as she does, they love you all the more. After several visits to the pharmacy and several treatments with lice shampoo, the little buggers returned, driving her to to tears and her parents to distraction. I had heard of a nitpicker in Brooklyn, a Hasidic woman who combed through your child’s hair the old-fashioned way and removed the little buggers and their eggs one by one. I was beginning to think of her as our last hope.

Wednesday night Franny and I drove out to an Orthodox section of Brooklyn to visit Abigail Rosenfeld, nitpicker of note. She lives in a house in what she called Flatbush, though technically it’s closer to Ditmas Park. She had been seeing people since nine that morning, including a whole family that drove in from New Jersey. They were all infested.

“In eighteen years of doing this it’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” she said, coming through my daughter’s hair. “An epidemic.” She eschews the ineffective lice shampoo and instead uses regular conditioner and a very sharp fine toothed comb to go through the hair, strand by strand. She showed me her catch, lice and nits that I had missed in my own grooming of Franny, all the while putting my daughter at ease. “Such beautiful hair,” she cooed while her kids played underfoot. She has ten (eleven on the way); the oldest was in the kitchen, studying to be a lifeguard, while the youngest was in diapers. Two small sons — Shlomo? Avika? — took turns changing him.

“When people ask me, ‘Why did I get lice?’ I tell them, ‘Cause God wanted you to,'” she said before she sent us off into the night with one of her fine-toothed combs and a promise to return for a check-up. Franny felt taken care of and I have to admit, when the lady ran the comb through my own inch-long hair and came up clean, I did too. Mazel tov, Abigail.