It's a bug's world

Much of my life has been punctuated by the presence of bugs and creepy crawlies. This is not a fact that I have always been comfortable with, but something that I had to learn to accept growing up in Louisiana, where the humidity is suffocating and the mosquitoes are as big as crows and as bloodthirsty as vampires. OFF and other bug sprays and repellents just seemed to egg them on and we spent our summer days and evenings splattering mosquitoes drunk with our own blood all over our arms and legs. I never tried this, but it was rumored that if you let the mosquitoes keep drinking, they would eventually burst. Personally, I have always preferred cold-blooded mosquito murder.

When the mosquitoes were not eating us alive, the horseflies were. As soon as the sun started to set, the giant, blood-sucking flies moved in. They especially liked to target us in the swimming pool, focusing on our faces and heads as we bobbed up and down, dodging them and trying to escape their painful bites. Usually they succeeded in driving us indoors…where the cockroaches were waiting.

At our house, the cockroaches were as under control as they could be with regular visits from the ‘bug man.’ The occasional big one came in from outside, but they were never a major problem (my mother would be horrified if she thought I was suggesting that we lived in a roach infested home. We did not). In my college and grad school apartments in New Orleans, though, it was another story. There was no controlling the humongous, scuttling, drunkenly flying bugs and our lack of general cleanliness, typical of college students, didn’t help the situation. Running across your floor or up your walls, these mammoth cockroaches were highly disturbing, but when they took flight it was as if they had no control and the only point of reference for landing always seemed to be the closest human. I have suffered the injustice of having a cockroach land on me on more than one occasion and will never forget how it feels to have one’s sticky, clinging legs, clenched to my arm or my thigh.

I also will never forget the feeling that came over me when I was lying in bed at night or turned the light on in the bathroom and realized that I was sharing space with an insect that was so big I could actually hear it moving around. One fateful night, I walked into my bathroom and heard the distinct sound of a very large roach, scuttling around in our bathroom cabinet. I could see its antenna silhouetted against the wall and decided that the best course of action was just to close the cabinet and pretend like I didn’t know it was there. Having accomplished that, I nervously walked over to the sink, where I nonchalantly lifted up an overturned Mardi Gras cup only to be greeted with ANOTHER cockroach, which my tender-hearted roommate had decided to trap and remove from the premises humanely. Unfortunately she got side tracked by a phone call and the cockroach remained in its prison until I came along. I nearly had a heart attack that night.

Cockroaches aside, perhaps the most disgusting thing that happened in that apartment was the boll weevil infestation (as reference to by my friend and former roommate Katie in my cooking blog). Being poor graduate students and not wanting to be wasteful, we decided that rather than throw out all of our boll weevil infested food, we were just going to skim the boll weevils off the surface of the rice and cereal and eat them anyway. For several days we lived liked this, attempting to ignore the fact that a lot of our food had tiny bugs in it. Eventually we came to our senses, tossed the food and had the house fumigated. I still can’t believe that we stooped so low as to knowingly eat bugs rather than just buy some new rice. I know for a fact that if our food had been infested with roaches instead of boll weevils, we wouldn’t have even considered such a thing.

England is blessed with cool weather and, therefore, fewer bugs. I’m sure that there are cockroaches in London, but I have lived four blissful years without encountering one of them. These days we are happy share our house with a few spiders and the occasional silverfish. Every evening before her bath, Evie and I sing Eensy Weensy Spider and relocate the resident bathroom spiders from the tub to a safe corner so that they don’t drown. I am superstitious and know that killing a spider—even if it kind of can’t be prevented when they are hanging out in the tub drain—is bad luck, so I try my best to do right by them. Occasionally an unfortunate spider is eaten by our cat Finchley and every once in a while, when I start to feel outnumbered, I do some population management with the vacuum cleaner (with the idea, obviously, that they are just being relocated to a new living space inside of the vacuum bag and NOT killed), but mostly we manage to co-exist in harmony with the creepy crawlies in our little flat. After all, they, like the rest of us, are just trying to make a living. And they aren't the size of small cows.