I heard the telltale signs while sitting upon my red sofa, typing away at some piece of writing or other. A part of me wanted to dismiss the flapping wing sounds since I hadn’t actually seen it. Seeing is believing, right? Reality check came soon enough when that little bastard flew straight toward me and landed on my knee.
I. Hate. Cockroaches.
Nearly two and a half years of living in Tanzania as a Peace Corps Volunteer had cured me of being afraid of them. They were in my closet nibbling on my clothes, feasting in my kitchen, even living in the hollowed out wooden bathroom door where they bred. I witnessed the whole cockroach lifecycle while taking bucket baths. I even discovered there was such a thing as albino cockroaches.
After all that, cockroaches still didn’t endear themselves to me. I popped its little ass with my bare hand before I reached for my house shoe. Then, I swept it up with a broom into a dust pan and tossed it outside, figuring that was that.
A few days later, as I’d just sat upon my throne, yet another cockroach startled me just hanging out on the ceiling. I preempted doing my business to get the lavender-scented insecticide, which I kept in the bathroom cabinet. After dealing with it, I used the bathroom and tossed it out with my preferred broom/dust pan method.
Afterward, I sat on the sofa, writing on my laptop, when yet another one scampered across the floor from the direction of my patio door. I jumped up, ran to the bathroom to grab the spray. Last I saw, it was headed under the sofa. With the spray in one hand and a flashlight in another, I got down on my knees to shine a light under the sofa in hopes that I’d flush it out from underneath. That son of a bitch came from behind, ran across my arm and kept going as if to say, “Catch me if you can!” Which I did and added it with the others outside.
I marveled about all of these 6-legged invaders. Even with the recent rains and warmer temperatures, I’ve lived in the same apartment since the summer of 2010 and I’ve NEVER had this many cockroaches in my apartment. I couldn’t even think through which recent changes in the environment must have caused the sudden rise of cockroaches when a third one shimmied down my patio vertical blinds. With the spray now beside me, I pounced on it, disposed of it only to turn around to see another peep from between the blinds and enter my apartment.
Once I dealt with the fourth one of the night, I closed the glass patio door. I no longer had confidence that the patio screen door was enough, but, truth be told, there were enough gaps with both patio doors closed that a determined insect could still get through. Or it could just walk under the half centimeter gap under my front door.
A part of me wanted to spray the outside of the patio entrance, but I’ve seen too many horror movies where the foolish person attempted to handle something late at night rather than wait for the light of day. In the meantime, I put in a maintenance request. I had no idea whether anything on their end could be done, but since I’d never had such a problem before, I believed that something had kept the insect population out of my place previously. I’ve always enjoyed patio breezes before–even after a nice rain.
Apparently, the pest control person always comes by the apartment complex on Wednesdays; so this time around, the person actually entered my apartment while I was at yoga to spray (so I imagine) around the inside of my place.
So far, so good. One of the small pleasures I take in my humble existence is patio breezes while writing and otherwise working on creative projects in my living room. I can’t surrender that to beings that survive a nuclear blast.