Bad Bugs and a Bug That Brings You Joy

I've grown to hate bugs. In Jersey, it was only the cockroach I had to worry about. And the occasional mosquito bite. But here... I've got bees the size of a man's big toe; I've got spiders you remove with pooper scoopers (well, that was actually Oklahoma); I've got ladybug infestations and stinkbugs; wood bees that are drilling my barn down; moths that are running amok; mud daubers, chiggers, superhuman ticks and don’t get me started on the flies. Anywhere you see cows, there are flies. Big flies, little flies, in-between flies, flies that give you the middle finger…


One time there was a praying mantis on the top of Kurt’s head like a jaunty hat. He looked this way and that way (the mantis, not Kurt) and was kind of cute until you remembered praying mantises cannibalize their mates after sex. What was he doing on Kurt’s head?



Kelly found a beautiful dragonfly the other day. Neon green. He was as big as my pinky. He was injured, so she brought him in the house. I said, “Very nice but this ain’t a baby bunny we can try to nurse back to health. It’s a bug!” and I made her take him back outside again. The next day when I was sweeping the front porch, I found his carcass behind the geraniums. I felt guilty. When the bugs are so big you feel bad about their deaths, it’s a problem.



I still kill them though. In Jersey, I’d scoop them up in a napkin and carry them outside where I set them free. Except the cockroaches. Here, I’ve learned that as soon as I see two of something right in a row, I’m in for an infestation. It is going to be holy hell. There is nothing cute about thousands of ladybugs crawling up the walls and across the ceiling and dropping into the mayonnaise when you’re trying to make a sandwich. This is what happened when we lived in the Amityville Horror House. Not here thank God. Here I’ve got what’s considered normal bugs for the area. Which is bad enough. A few dozen of this, a couple of that. Just enough to annoy me, sting me now and then, and make me scratch.




I like some of the bugs. Lightning bugs. Cicadas. When they make that clicking noise, it reminds me of a hot summer day. Crickets. They’re good luck. And butterflies. Butterflies remind me of my mother. She loved butterflies. She had butterfly decorations in her house and a sweatshirt with a butterfly appliqué on it. She even had a tattoo of a butterfly on her ankle. I don’t even have any tattoos and she had one. I was very proud of her for that.

The morning of her funeral, everyone was waiting in their cars to proceed to the cemetery. The funeral home guys were going back and forth carrying all the flowers out to the hearse, and the family, Kurt and I, my dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, were standing outside the door watching them, smoking cigarettes and crying. The limos were waiting for us to get in, the doors opened.

All of a sudden a big yellow butterfly flew out of the funeral home door and fluttered in and out of us. It flew all around. We all started screaming. “Look! Look! It’s Mommy!” Then it flew up, up, up over the roof and disappeared into the sky. We all watched it go.


This was in April. It was cold up in Jersey. Butterflies weren’t even out yet. And butterflies don’t live inside funeral homes. It was a sign from my mother telling us it was okay, she was still with us, maybe not in the way we were used to, but she was here. And we really needed that. None of us is religious. Some of us don’t even believe in God. How do you get comfort if you can’t tell yourself, “She is in Heaven now?” I’ve come to realize that’s one reason why religion is good. Comfort. Or else you need a good, old fashioned butterfly.

The Fly Swatter

Nobody can kill flies like I do. I just wake up, walk into the kitchen, some flies are flying around getting ready to annoy me, and wham! wham! wham! Dead. Three in a row, dead as doorknobs. I don’t even have to be fully awake to hit my target. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I land one. That’s a really good success rate. I have a technique but I’m not going to divulge my secret unless you beg me.

My family up north couldn’t care less about prying it out of me. It’s useless information to them. They live in places with windows they never open. It’s a permanent seventy degrees there all year long—heated in the winter, air conditioned in the summer. And there are no livestock around so nothing to attract flies. They don’t even own a fly swatter.

Coming from there, I was shocked at the amount of flies I got when we first moved out to Oklahoma. And it didn’t get any better when we moved to Virginia, first to the Amityville Horror House and then to here. The flies were all the same in the country. Relentless terrorists who zeroed in on the rim of my coffee cup the minute I put it down. They’re about as bad as roaches, disgusting-wise. Think about what they walk on.

I kill so many of them I’m tired of wasting a whole napkin to pick them up. Can’t leave mangled fly bodies around. I wish I could say that I also have a technique, maybe a swift flick of the wrist that stops their hearts without decapitating them or scattering fly limbs and broken wings, but no, fly murder cannot always be accomplished neatly. There’s often a clot of guts left behind and the first phase of clean-up is to remove it with half a napkin. I follow with a disinfect by wiping for a minimum of thirty seconds with my cleaning rag soaked with Pine Sol. Well, that thirty-second thing is not true. But I do use the Pine Sol.

You’d think the flies were smart, the way they hang around on the door hoping to hitch a ride inside when you come in. There they are, hovering out there, like vultures, walking up the glass, congregating on the molding, just waiting for their chance. And then, zoom! They rush inside and land willy-nilly on the kitchen counter or the back of a chair or the rim of a coffee cup. I get the fly swatter. I won’t be able to relax until I put him out of his misery. He’s got about ten seconds left. I don’t know why they don’t spread the word to the others. There is death in here. It is much safer outside in the barn where there’s horse manure to land on and half-eaten cat food Lovely the Barn Cat left behind. All those cows next door, why, you’d think they’d be having a heyday. But no, they’ve got to come in here.

I’m also in charge of getting rid of the ladybugs, stink bugs and spiders. I try not to kill the spiders. I tell Kurt, “Spiders are our friends.” But he’s scared of them. I can barely get him to get it together enough to hand me one of his humongous size twelve-and-a-half steel-toed work boots when I am standing guard over one because I can’t take my eyes off it or else he’ll get away and I, reluctantly, have to kill it. Some of them look mean and you know they bite or they’re just too big or fast to catch and carry outside. So I’m watching it and I’m motioning with my hand, “Com’on, com’on, give me a shoe, give me something!” But my back-up, Kurt and Kelly, are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Finally I grab a magazine and I smack it. Now I have to rip the back page off and throw it away.

You’d think I’d be scared of bugs, coming from the city. And being a girl. But nope, not really. I’ve been known to whack a cockroach barehanded if I spot one running across my kitchen counter. You can’t let a roach get away. You’ve got to kill him any way you can or else when you get up to go pee in the middle of the night, you flick on the switch, and suddenly find yourself with a hundred roaches scattering in all directions. You’ve just got to think of the long-term picture and not your short-term revulsion. Just get the job done or else it’ll get worse.

I guess that’s how I got the job of bug eradicator around here. It’s not really fair. It’s a dirty job. But someone’s got to do it.

Edited to add: Kurt wants me to clarify that I am roach savvy because of past experience, not because I have them now. I grew up in Jersey City in apartment buildings where it was not uncommon for them to spread from one apartment to another depending on the tenants. Here, we have flies, stink bugs, ladybugs, spiders, chiggers, ticks, various beetles and assorted insects I am not familiar with, but no cockroaches.