March 3:
Twice tonight a mouse appeared on the kitchen counter while we were eating dinner five feet away. Twice! It was lightning quick diving back behind the stove, which I am convinced if we were to pull out would just be a wall teeming with mice and every breed of cockroach in some unholy, skittering orgy of filth and symbiosis.
I’ve mentioned before that I have never kept a cleaner house. Every utensil lives in a sealed container. Every surface is scrubbed and wiped with disinfectant immediately following meals. The only thing left in the open at night that remotely resembles something edible is our sleeping bodies in our beds.
Glue traps, glue traps everywhere.
But yesterday, after dinner I went to pick up a roll of paper towels from the counter. There was a cockroach leg, unmistakably, a giant cockroach leg just…laying across the clean white surface of the towels we used to wipe our hands and mouths with while we eat.
There was no rest of the cockroach. I looked. The towels were in plain sight during dinner. But at some point, it must’ve strolled right by, shed it’s leg, and *poof*.
Or maybe it threw the leg from a hidden place, you know, to send a message. I suppose that it doesn’t matter how it got there, yet I did yell, “HOW?! HOW THOUGH?!” over and over again upon seeing it. The point is that it was there.
It was there mocking me.
Because they know i may push them back and claim victories in battle, but THE WAR- the war belongs to them.
March 24:
Now, I preface this by saying that I live in an attic that runs the length of a large old house. Beneath us are 8 tiny apartments that aren’t in the best shape because only the attic was fully renovated. The apartments rent cheaply and from what I can tell from my neighbor’s curtainless windows, they aren’t kept very tidy and the inhabitants are often gone for days at a time.
For the last few days, I’ve been gradually, finally dusting the bedroom shelves. That’s where I keep my smallish library and it’s been a good year since I’ve touched any of the books. I finally get to the wine crate shelves that I’ve had forever and that contain the books of the most personal value to me.
The tops of the books are covered with blackish gray CLUMPS of dust, and I’m playing whack -a -mole with the silverfish as they scurry out, but all of this was to be expected -though I did ruin the pages of a Yeats when I got startled by a sneaky huge one and instinctively snapped the book closed on it.
Anyway, as I said- I expected the silverfish. But when I’m down to the last 5 books of the last crate, I pull 2 of them down and am greeted with the PAINFULLY too familiar sight of a pile of roach feces. There’s a few pellets along the pages of the books as well and no sooner had I thought that maybe, just maybe, this mess was left behind long ago by a long gone bug- I see two very long antennae sticking out from behind the last 3 books.
I debated on how to go about this for a minute before deciding on using the broom handle as my mode of attack. So I take it and knock the books away and this huge bastard RUNS UP THE %^$^ HANDLE OF THE BROOM. Right for my fingers.
I scream, appropriately, and hurl the broom like a javelin through the doorway. The roach scurries away and I am left to confirm the awful idea that place where the breeding had been taking place, might have been in the place I love most.
Sure enough I found some old dried egg casings pressed along the closed book pages of several books, but thankfully it looked like they were old and maybe for whatever reason they decided to not make my shelves their forever home.
April 4-June 28
I thought I was pretty much at the end of my tether by this point.
Then I noticed the smell.
It was something in the neighborhood of cat urine, but it didn’t come from the cat box or anywhere the cat could be peeing without us noticing. It was in the kitchen area, but as I’ve said- everything was cleaned. I would catch a whiff of it near the sink, but even beneath the sink was clear of any signs of pests, a strange thing really, when the expert websites I had consulted all agreed that signs of an infestation are generally found there because it’s a common entry point. But…nope. Nothing.
Then one day, I see one of the roaches, about two inches long, run behind my Cuisianart. I love my food processor, It’s my nicest appliance- a gift I use often and kept close to the sink. I don’t see anything under it, so I carefully pull it out, expecting the roach to scurry up the side, but it doesn’t. It’s just gone.
Just to be sure, I pick up the food processor, and I hear something…rattle. There are narrow vent openings, but there is no way that huge bug could squeeze in there. Right? But if it did, I want it out. So I bring it to the sink and give it a shake.
Blackish grains, like thick coffee grinds fall into the stainless steel bottom of the sink. I shake again and out drops a roach leg. My stomach crawls to my throat, but I’m also angry at this point so I shake hard and a whole f#cking giant and very alive cockroach plops out.
I shriek and somehow manage to not drop the food processor. I grab the roach with a handful of about 87 paper towels and stuff it in a plastic grocery bag, and then in 17 other grocery bags, and tie it in as many knots as I can make before putting in the trash.
I also use bags to wrap the food processor up tight. My logic here is that I don’t want anymore getting in there and that even though I’ll have to figure out a way to open it up to clean out the whatever feces may be left in there eventually , I’d had enough for one day.
I set it back on the counter.
It stays like that for two weeks before I can get Mark to open the bags so he can see what tools are going to be needed to take it apart. When he finally opened the first bag, the smell hit- the stench of something dead and covered in greasy urine. He gets as far as the second bag and through it we can see a brown smear that used to be a cockroach. NOPE.
We decide to wrap it in more garbage bags and put it in the freezer. The cold will kill anything eventually, including the odor, while we figure out what to do.
I look online, and find nothing; no cases of roaches invading a kitchen appliance. I even look up appliance repair to see if I could hand the job off to someone else, but no one in the area deals with food processors and I doubt anyone would take this job if they did. This was an expensive bit of hardware and tossing it is only a last resort. So it sits in the freezer.
It sits in there for months.
It’s an easy thing to keep putting off. There is a never a day we are going to wake up and feel like dealing with that particular horror. But then the possibility of moving comes up, I’m on a mission to get rid of things we don’t need and guess whose learned to go without effortlessly blending soups and dips?
We figure it is at least worth trying to clean and maybe the inside won’t be so bad. After all, the things probably tried to get out and died in the various bags. So I move the table away from the kitchen area and bring out gloves and cleaning supplies and I back away.
Mark is brave and has a stronger stomach than I do. He cuts the bags open and just as I thought, there were several dead roaches in the layers of plastic. But inside…
…an actual roach motel.
That was it.
They won.
We handed them the keys and moved.
