In Bed with Bob

About four years ago, in the fall, I noticed a large number of fairly ugly bugs trying to snuggle into the frames of the casement windows of my house. They did not have the jaws of wood-eaters, so I mainly worried about squishing them in the window mechanism as I snugged the house for the coming of cold weather.

I'd been invaded by lady bugs in the fall before. They're cute little orange things with black spots, the sort of thing rendered in costume jewelry for little girls. They don't come around anymore.

The new winter guests soon managed to squeeze the rest of the way into the house. They're startlingly grotesque and, like many large bugs, sociably inclined. They love to fly up and land on you, or crawl up beside you to see what you are doing.

A little research disclosed only that they are called "leaf-legged bugs." While they are related to the notorious cone-nosed kissing bugs, blood-suckers of the south and southwest, our particular species seems to eat only plant juices.

Laurie and I had had a run of bad luck with animals we had named, losing one long-term pet and several adopted refugee birds from the shooting preserve across the street. So we figured the best way to exterminate the bugs was to name them. So we called them all Bob.

Bob does die, but Bob is numerous. Bob flies into light fixtures. Bob gets stepped on. Bob gets played with by the cats, though not too much, because he gives off an odor like crushed leaves when disturbed, particularly when crushed himself. Whenever I catch Bob in a window, I open it and flick him out into the natural world he fled. Go hibernate in a log somewhere, dammit.

Fortunately, Bob doesn't breed in the house. The number of Bobs represents only those who managed to squeeze into the house in the fall.

We've developed a truce. I'm not going to blast poisonous chemicals into my tightly-closed house just to kill a harmless, though unsightly, bug. So we try to get along. But sometimes Bob goes too far.

Two or three times now, Bob has crawled into bed with me. The bed is under a window. Bob is climbing my pillow to get to the window sill, or falling from the curtain. It's nothing personal.

Last night, I felt a tickling on my hand. When I scrached it, I felt the familiar crunch and smelled the crushed-leaf odor. I snapped on the light to evict the now five-legged Bob. It was 4:30 a.m. I twitched and scratched for the last hour before it was time to get up. Stupid Bob.

In this regard, spring can't come soon enough for any of us. But they're better than roaches.