Pest Control Fixation

Both my husband and I share the experience of sitting down on ant nests as children. I was stripped and dunked in a tub, he was lucky enough to be at a lake.

When I was eleven years old, I woke up with an live insect in my ear. Two hours later a doctor at the emergency room poured alcohol in my ear and carefully used tweezers to remove the dead insect and then its egg sack.

Early in our marriage, when we moved from an apartment building in New York to a duplex in New Jersey, we actually fumigated our rented moving truck and let it stand overnight before bringing our personal items in our new apartment.

Two years later, when our upstairs neighbors moved out and our new neighbors moved in, they brought roaches with them. We spent several summer nights eating out on the patio with our dog tied up outside and our cats penned up in carriers, while we had roach bombs going off in our apartment. It meant covering our fifty gallon fish tank to make sure our fish were not poisoned. It meant rewashing every dish and every piece of silverware we owned.

When we bought our own home and moved further out into the suburbs, and roaches were no longer an issue. Now our pest control problems were ants, spiders, field mice, centipedes, pigeons and morning doves.

One Christmas Eve, I thought I saw something flicking from our cat's mouth. I approached her to investigate and she released a field mouse that she had been playing with. The mouse promptly scampered up our live Christmas tree. I could see it's beady little eyes reflecting through the thick branches near the top of the tree. The tree spent the rest of the holidays out on the porch.

I watched my beautiful roses being destroyed by aphids, caterpillars and beetles and learned that the deer that sheltered on our property most likely carried deer ticks. When I was a kid, I routinely ran barefoot in the grass at my grandparents country home, but I can't do that at my own home for fear of Lyme disease.

While visiting my Mother on the Gulf Coast, I was bitten by a tiny little spider and spent two days delirious with a fever.

I'm on assignment now in Alabama and living in an apartment again. The change of the season brought out the giant roaches about the length of my index finger, that people mistakenly refer to as water bugs.

I'm without my cat, who'll kill anything that big that invades her space. Or my husband, and while I hate being stereotypical, taking care of any pest that large should a man's job.

So yes, right now, I'm fixated on pest control. Do you blame me?