Creepy, Crawly Bugs

Eeeewww! We have bugs in our house once again. I have always associated bugs with dirty houses – houses where people didn’t do the dishes, take out the trash, throw out rotting food. I had always prided myself on the fact that for years and years we had no bugs – except for a random cricket in the basement, we were bug-free.

I have always had an aversion to bugs, growing up in northern Florida where the cockroaches were often several inches long. I remember hiding in the bathroom while my mother would kill one that had strayed into view, trying to avoid the sweet stink that accompanied smashing them.

It was just last year that I was gossiping with my friend Rebecca about the fact that our friend Bill had ants in his kitchen and didn’t even seem to notice them. In her typical way of setting me straight, she said, “Oh, cut him some slack! A lot of houses on Capitol Hill have ants.” And just two weeks later, we had ants in our house. As annoying and persistent as they are, ants are really easy to get rid of. You simply get some “ant hotels” and they march into them in a straight line, eat the poison, and never come out.

Soon after the ants departed, we began to see flying bugs. They didn’t bite and they didn’t seem to be coming from anything in particular or headed for any specific destination. My husband actually named them “those dumb bugs” because they were so easy to kill. You simply had to swat at them, they fell to the ground, and you could squish them. They didn’t even stain the paint if you smashed them against the walls, coming off like a layer of gray ash. We finally determined that they were originating from a bag of kitty litter on a top shelf awaiting another round of snow and ice. When it was gone, so were they.

But now we have a new bug – a little brown weevil type bug. They don’t fly, hop, bite, or move very fast. What is so incredible about these bugs is that they are everywhere. I keep asking myself if they walked to the basement or if they just jumped inside the heat ducts and were thrown out down there. David started randomly pitching out good food, feeling sure that our bag of apples or my uneaten chocolate bar had to be the source of the little beetles. In desperation he finally called an exterminator, who said they were food related and went away to research a way to get rid of them without using poison that would harm us or the dogs.

I want to be free of these unwanted guests that follow me everywhere. I want to invite everything and everybody who enters my house. BUG-FREEDOM is my obsession right now!