Cockroach Encounters of the Worst Kind

To put it gently, I am not fond of cockroaches. In some of the places I have lived, however, I learned to accept an occasional cockroach as a part of life. There are times when no amount of cleaning or orderliness seems to deter the evil beings from attempting to share your home. In the past, I’ve almost become accustomed to their presence in long-untouched cupboards and dark recesses, but I have never learned to like them.

I’ll never forget the time when I was carrying the cardboard box which contained my mom’s glass punch bowl and the set of twenty cups that went with it. As I carried the box across the outdoor kitchen, I looked down into it, and saw two large cockroaches scurrying around inside. I did not stop to think, because my reflex reaction to that unnerving sight was to throw the box of glassware as far as I could. I flung the box away with a scream, and my family came rushing to where I was. Isaac killed the cockroaches, and Mom reprimanded me for the unwise action of tossing a box full of glass items. Amazingly, there were no casualties as a result of incident (other than the two cockroaches, I mean)! The glass had been packed well enough that not a single piece of the set broke.

Probably my most sinister encounter with a cockroach occurred while I was ironing clothes. I was happily standing in our outside kitchen and ironing one of my dad’s shirts while chatting with my brother and sister when suddenly I became aware of two beady little eyes staring at me from the edge of my ironing board. The cockroach insolently climbed to the top of my ironing board and began walking around on the pile of clothes. I screamed, and jumped on top of the nearby chest freezer. Lizzy backed quickly into the house, slammed the screen door, and locked it with a sturdy padlock. I assume she wanted to make sure that the cockroach couldn’t enter the house unless it had a key. Isaac and I were left outside to deal with the cockroach. While I was screaming for Isaac to kill it, and he was screaming back at me “Get me the broom to kill it with!!” I threw him the broom from my perch on the freezer and he whacked the cockroach off my ironing board. He then proceeded to continue to whack the cockroach with the broom while it attempted to run away. When the cockroach finally stopped moving and he had disposed of it, I got back off the freezer, went back to ironing, and called inside to tell Lizzy that it was safe to unlock the door.

I can still vividly picture the many times when I would open up a cupboard door in the morning in order to get something for breakfast, only to find a giant cockroach staring at me indignantly, as if I had intruded on private property. Usually, when that occurred, I would quietly close the cupboard door, and limit my breakfast to whatever food was in the refrigerator.

One of our only truly long-term cockroach residents was the one who lived in the overflow hole of our bathroom sink for many months. It was rather unnerving to see his antennae waving around inside the overflow hole as you bent over the sink to brush your teeth. We tried to drown him out a few time by pouring cups of water into the overflow hole, but it didn’t work, he was always there the next day. Finally, we didn’t see the cockroach inside the sink anymore. We figured he must have died or moved to a more comfortable home, and the brushing of teeth was now a much more pleasurable experience. However, after more than a year of enjoying the cockroach-free bathroom sink, we noticed that once again there was a pair of antennae waving back and forth inside the overflow hole. One day someone saw the cockroach scurry past the hole again. Yet another one of these foul creatures had discovered the cockroach-friendly home inside our sink.

My siblings could tell spine-tingling stories of cockroaches that have run over their feet, and I’ll never forget the time one crawled up the handle of the broom I was using to sweep the floor. I imagine that among the nine members of my family, we have enough tales of cockroach encounters to fill a book, or else that we could spend an entire evening regaling guests with cockroach stories (to the extreme discomfiture of our guests). But I really don’t think that the little vermin deserve that much publicity, so they’ll just have to be content with this short article.