Death of a cockroach

We made it to the beach late yesterday afternoon, and it turns out this is the nicest beach house any of us have ever seen. It feels like we're staying in the pages of a decorating magazine.

So I was caught more than a little offguard by a cockroach in our bed this morning. I had woken up early because our room was pretty sunny, but Matt was still sleeping so I stayed under the covers and started reading.

I have just discovered Anne Lamott, even though she's been around for a long time, and she is my favorite author of the moment. I love her style: "In his late twenties, no longer using drugs but drunk most nights, he realized he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards, and he quit."

I digress. So I was absorbed in "Blue Shoe" while Matt slept when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a fast-moving roach making its way across the blanket over my shoulder. I screamed and threw my book onto the floor and leapt out of bed. Matt, rudely awakened, followed.

The roach lost no time disappearing somewhere in the vicinity of the bed. I knew we needed to find it and kill it or I wouldn't be able to relax in that bed again.

I can handle spiders and snakes and dirty diapers and plenty of other things that make a lot of people squeamish, but I have no tolerance for roaches. This stems from my summer in Ashland, Ky., where I loved my job but made about $300 a week and lived in a crackhouse that had been converted to apartments. (The month after I moved back to North Carolina, my former coworkers emailed me that a guy on the fifth floor, right above me, had randomly been shot to death in the hallway by a man who had followed him home from Wal-Mart.)

The whole building was THOROUGHLY infested with huge, flying roaches. All of the people I worked with referred to them as "waterbugs," and for a while telling myself that they were "just waterbugs" made them more tolerable. Then my parents visited and Dad examined the specimens I had frozen in a Ziploc bag and told me that he was sorry but they were plain old roaches.

At least they didn't bite. When Amanda lived in Charleston she told me there was a huge, flying, biting roach variety.

The roaches ruled my apartment. They would crawl up the drain into my bathtub and race across my walls and show up in my bed. I had to sleep like a mummy, wrapped up from head to toe in a sheet, even though I couldn't afford to run the air conditioning and the heat was sweltering. I could not deal with their guts so usually I just trapped them under cups and let Matt kill them when he visited.

Back to this mornng. I put on my running shoes because one thing I cannot stand the thought of is a roach running across my bare feet. Then I took a flip flop in my hand and started searching.

Matt gave up almost immediately and followed the scent of orange danishes and coffee to the kitchen. I finally found the roach and killed it, screaming again, signaling Matt to come back and clean up the mess, which he did. Then I had an orange danish myself.