Lift Up Your Hearts!

It was a scene worthy of one of those funniest-videos shows.  As I opened the front door this morning to take out the trash, I obviously interrupted something.  A lizard skittered frantically away from the door, no doubt afraid of me.  At the same time, a palmetto bug* skittered frantically towards me, into the house, no doubt relieved to escape the lizard.

I'm not all that fond of palmetto bugs outside the house, though I acknowledge that they, like vultures, have an important part to play in God's creation.  But I really don't care for them inside the house, so thus began the amusiing scenario.  I don't recall laughing at the time, but it would have been funny to an onlooker with a camera, who I'm very glad was only hypothetical.

I skittered frantically after the bug, whacking at him with my sneaker.  (It's a good thing we keep our shoes near the front door.)  Alas, I whacked at him, but not on him, or at least not with sufficient strength to penetrate his chitinous exoskeleton.  Through the hall he ran, then ducked into our bedroom.

No fair!  This pushed into the red zone my desire to catch him, as anyone knows who has ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a large insect investigating his belly button.  He ran under a suitcase.  I moved it; he wasn't there.  Ah ha!  He thinks he's found safety in the shadow of the treadmill support.  He's partly right, as there is no way for me to whack at him.  I carefully position the shoe over him and press down, then slowly, gingerly lift it up.  Zoom!  He's out again, unharmed.  There are disadvantages to soft, high-pile carpet, I'm learning.

Now I'm mad.  He's in the open now, and I may run more slowly for my size, but my legs are a lot longer than his.  Whack!  This time I know better than to assume he's dead.  I push down on the shoe really hard, though still with care; one wants to kill the beastie, not squeeze cockroach guts into the above-mentioned soft, high-pile carpet.

Once again, I tentatively raise a corner of the sneaker.  There's an antenna, and it's not moving....  Taking no chances, I grab a tissue from my pocket and use it to entomb the bug, then finish the job.  Bug thoroughly squished, and I mean thoroughly, else I would not have felt comfortable consigning him, paper tomb and all, to the trash bin.

Still, for sheer amusement value, this doesn't come close to an occasion several years ago, when similar circumstances led me to chase one of this guy's cousins under our kitchen cabinets.  I was lying on the floor, seeking him out with the help of a flashlight, when he suddenly re-emerged, zipping past my face, through the neck of my shirt, and into my bra.  He died for his presumption, but I'll leave imagining the scenario as an exercise for the reader.

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*A palmetto bug is a large species of cockroach common here in the South.  It is thought to have come here from Africa, and may be a kind of karmic return for slavery, much as cigarettes and casinos are for our mistreatment of Native Americans.