Category: Blog

Pest Cemetery—sometimes dead is better

Well, no, I am not talking about Stephens King’s Pet Sematary. The book’s theme that “Sometimes dead is better” rings true for this saga.

Pest Cemetery refers to the interior of our home. It has become an eternal resting place for brown marmorated stink bugs. Armed with a shield-shaped body, these insects have overwhelmingly invaded our house. They suddenly land in the strangest places—on my windowsill, the edge of my wine glass, in my wine glass.  

But more than their flying around and landing on my nose while I’m asleep (which can be beyond annoying), they die in weird places. Expiration can occur on the edge of a door frame. They cling vertically as if velcroed to their final resting place. Some meet their maker on my bathroom mirror looking into their own dead eyes. Others give up the ghost on the shower floor prompting me to yell, “Not another one!” I gingerly step around them but vehemently catapult them over the shower door. I do not want to test the reason for their name.

I do admire these odorous, in-your-face insects. While I politely escort them outside, leaving their fate to Mother Nature, my husband throws them in the toilet. “Sink or swim,” he commands. Down they go to a watery death, shrouded in two plies of Charmin Ultra Strong.

Actually, they swim more often than sink. One stink bug endured three flushes before it finally succumbed to the toilet’s whirlpool. Time after time after time, it had slowly crawled up the porcelain bowl. One of its six legs almost touched the outer rim—so close yet so far away. What determination, what grit.

Once when I wasn’t very stink-bug-compassionate because they had grown fond of my glasses, I tried vacuuming one up. It was nonchalantly cruising the hallway, checking out our dust bunnies. My Black & Decker failed to suck up this determined stink bug. What it was holding on to or how, I have not a clue. But it clung to the hardwood floor as if gorilla-glued.

Slowly compassion or maybe exhaustion set in. I carefully transported it to the front walk in hopes that some wren would swoop down for a quick snack. Okay, not the most compassionate move for the stink bug, but I didn’t want another corpse to avoid stepping on. I, might, though, have made a wren happy.

Hopefully, our bugs do not rise from the dead to embark like Pet Semetary’s Gage on a deadly rampage. I’d hate to be in a headline that read, “Elderly couple devoured by Zombie stink bugs.” Might the resurrected bugs come bounding out of our septic tank, ready for revenge? Maybe.

But this entomological nightmare has caused me to think about how we treat creatures that do not have Insta-worthy, “Oh, they are so adorable” bodies or personalities.  I’m not sure just how important they are to the ecosystem, but they are alive.

These nuisances do not hurt humans although in Ten-Commandment-plague numbers, they can ruin crops. Many people eagerly feed the cute deer even though an oversized herd can die of starvation or cause devastating car accidents. But an innocent stink bug? Just flush it down the toilet or relegate it to the whims of nature.

Which then makes me wonder—how many people do I flush down the toilet?  They don’t look like I think they should look—flush. They “bug” me—flush. They don’t behave as I think they should behave—flush.  They don’t believe as I think they should believe—flush them out of my life.

The next time I’m about to quickly misjudge or stereotype someone, before I flush, I will take a moment. Yes, some folks must be flushed from my life. Others will need a trip to my front deck where they can start their search for a more welcoming home.  Many, though, I will patiently consider, maybe meet for coffee, perhaps share a walk. Will they flush me or I flush them? Not everyone has to be my BFF or I theirs, but we owe each other respect.

I also owe my stink bugs that respect—if they promise to stay out of my hair. When they die, I will gently pick them up. Their grave will be one of my wastebaskets, neatly lined with Best Value garbage bags. No more watery graves or soggy shrouds.

Photo credit: Wisconsin Horticulture, hort.uwex.edu

Only my premature judgments, quick stereotyping, hidden prejudices, and impatience will I flush. Sometimes dead is better.

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Recipe chaos

Chaos

From recipe chaos to recipe harmony? Kinda

Cabin Fever struck me in an odd way last month. Having been housebound for days because of snow, flash floods, and plain laziness, an urge to organize overcame me. No desire to brave the 14-degree weather so I could escape the house, just a need to do something useful.

Not that I couldn’t have been doing that all along, but Arctic weather, pouting skies, and howling winds drove me to relaxing with a cup of hot chocolate and reading for hours without an ounce of guilt. Then the sun came out, making me restless as my mother’s guilt-conjuring voice urged me from my sanctuary. “You’ve lingered too long. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” suddenly sprang into my consciousness.

Well, I could look for that Ala Vodka recipe that John and I loved. We had made it way back in the fall. Where did we file it?  For years we have saved our favorite recipes, clipped them from newspapers, printed our online favorites, collected handwritten ones from our Circle Supper Super Chefs, and filed them in notebooks.

The notebooks started out well organized because my husband, John the Engineer, loves categories and dividers. He meticulously hole punched the recipes to fit our notebook, filed  them in their appropriate section, all in alphabetical order and easy to locate.

Then I started adding to the notebooks. I crammed recipes into side pockets, because I was too busy to properly file them away. I’d print them from websites and toss them Helter Skelter into the loose leaf. They just hung out there, candidates for hide and seek expeditions when I needed that special Peppercorn Cream Steak Sauce. Oh, there it is, slipped in between The Pioneer Woman’s Caramel Sauce and my friend Bonnie’s Triple Berry Sangria. Well, at least it was in with the S’s.

Granted, I am retired and have time to properly file each recipe. But I needed to read my books, solve the LA Times crossword puzzles, and teach myself Sudoku. Organizing recipes, really? How uninspiring, until . . .

That shivery day that Cabin Fever hit. My Presbyterian upbringing had emphasized that too much slacking off could send you straight down the primrose path, so I gathered all our recipe books, the loose recipes, printed out recipes from my computer file, and got to work. That Ala Vodka recipe was still MIA—maybe I’d find it, but in the meantime, I’d have organized recipes never to lose another one.

I wouldn’t say that our recipes are now perfectly organized or ready for display on Pinterest, but they are corralled in one notebook–mostly. One notebook that John has kept for over 30 years, still houses appetizers, soups, and desserts. We will keep that as a specialty book.

My French friend Marguerite gave us an exquisitely bound cloth Livre de recettes that encourages only handwritten recipes. No words but an intricately sketched tabs indicate food categories. Who would want to desecrate such a beautiful book with pasted, magazine recipes? (Look for that gorgeous coral cover in the top photo.)  It’s a recipe shortcut to those utilitarian recipes we use time and again. The big notebook acts more like the Safari browser, a way to find old or new recipes when we don’t know what we want for dinner.

While I am proud of my well-organized loose leaf of our recipes, the handwritten recipes are special. Somehow those strokes and curls and dots over i’s intermingled with a greasy smudge here and there, make those recipes all ours. It no longer belongs to All Recipes or Food Network but to our families to one day peruse and say, “Oh, I remember her making this hummingbird cake for my birthday.”

For now our recipes are no longer condemned to total chaos–maybe to limbo—but my  mother no longer sits on my shoulder “tsk, tsking” but with a smile on her face.