I'm Buggin'

I call them stink bugs, but now I don’t know why. They’re harmless and take residence in all my window panes, and I’ve become accustomed to opening the screen and giving them a flick like a child’s paper football, aiming for a spot and celebrating a successful field goal.

With the coming of the New England winter, these and other bugs take refuge where they can find warmth. We have a ladybug hut were resides a small colony that will be released in the spring, but stink bugs get the Roman thumbs down when momma finds them, and thus the executioner, ie moi, gives them a painless ham-fisted death, and a fast pass to the septic tank.

Brushing my teeth a week ago, a stink bug crawled from underneath our toiletry basket to say hi. Alone a bug has my sympathy; in hoards I call the exterminator. I thought briefly about squashing him and getting it over with. I threw one outside a month ago and haven’t slept soundly since—it’s freakin’ cold out there, and he had a drop of gasoline’s chance in a furnace of surviving. So I scooped him up and let him crawl on the back of my hand, and took him to a corner of the house that gave him the least chance of detection. By the next morning, he was back under the basket.

Then my wife spotted him and pronounced sentence. “Ok,” I said, “just give me a minute.” She waited patiently, tapping her foot. “Don’t worry, I’ll get to it. Go on now.” So she left, and I picked him up and started for that far corner once again.

“Daddy, aren’t you going to kill it?” Jackson asked. Both my boys were taking a bath, and my oldest was peering up at me.

“I’m going to hide it in the other room.”

“Can I see it?”

My youngest son Emmett agreed, “See bug!”

I put the stink bug under their noses, which caused Jackson to crash back into the tub wall as if I had Jedi powers, and he readily came to his mother’s point of view. And so it came to pass that a little mole revealed my deception.

“So you’ve been hiding the bug in your office have you?” My wife had that look on her face, that half amused expression she gets when I’ve done something clumsy.

“I’m gonna kill that kid!” I said facetiously.

But our little stink bug was given a pass, and my wife tacitly agreed to ignore him until the summer. I only prayed that he wasn’t a she.

Yesterday morning I felt a little crunch under my bare foot as I stepped out of the shower. He was a tough little dude, not quite dead as his antennae seemed to conduct the orchestra of his last rites. I covered him with a couple squares of toilet paper and finished the job. May he rest in peace.