I consider myself a fairly independent woman. I own my own house; I do my own renovation work; I clean out the bathroom drain when it gets clogged with hair; I used to change my own oil. I even take care of the dead mice in my mousetraps myself. On most accounts, I think I can safely say that I am pretty independent. That is, of course, except for when it comes to bugs. Nothing makes me want to run down the street screaming like a little girl with her hair on fire than bugs in my house. Unfortunately, when you live alone, the downside to this reaction is that there’s no one left in your house to actually deal with the bug–and let’s face it, my freeloader dog certainly isn’t going to do it–so when I return from my screaming bout, the bug is, most likely, still going to be there. Somewhere. Even if it’s temporarily crawled away, I can be pretty sure that the sucker is just waiting for me to be lulled into complacency that its absence means it found a nicer, cleaner home to terrorize before it reappears to harass me further.
When I was growing up, the kinds of bugs we’d get in our house were generally run-of-the-mill garden spiders and those creepy zillion-leggers that run faster than Usain Bolt when you go after them. (Thankfully, they also disintegrate into a million little pieces when you hit them with a shoe, so they’re pretty easy to kill if you can get a clean shot. Although I will say that their post-mortem twitching legs freak me the fuck out.) Now that I live in a city, the variety of bugs has changed. The spiders have gone away, which is really too bad as I pretty much learned how to live in harmony with the little bug-eaters. I now still have those zillion-leggers, but I also have cockroaches. Not the little kind, oh no–the massive, several-inch-long kind that lumber across your living room floor just as you’re settling in to watch another episode of Downton Abbey on Netflix. Not. Cool.