After many years of marriage the Blonde in the house and I have certain understandings. For example, if I am minding my own business and hear her scream once, I continue doing what I was. One scream merely means that she has mistaken some dust or dirt for a bug. Two screams mean that it is a bug, but it is dead, so I amble in and pick it up.
More than two screams means that it is alive, and that I had better get there to protect her, which I do post haste. Now, if there are multiple blood curling screams at a very high level, it means that not only is it alive, but it is one of considerable size that has its fangs out and is ready to attack. For those, I have to get there very quickly, if not faster.
This goes back to when we had been married a short time. Two months to the day of our marriage, I was drafted. I ended up being assigned to Ft. Gordon, Ga. As a Pittsburgh girl, she had never seen roaches, and there were more than a few in Georgia. We ended up in a small apartment building in Augusta with about five other military families.
One day when I was away, she ran into a big one and did the multiple scream, and all the neighbors came running. After that when she screamed, they just said, “Oh, Ginny has seen a roach again”. She got the bugs though by drowning them in a entire can of bug spray. We went through a considerable number of spray cans during our tenure there. We moved north when I left the Army and all was well.
All was well, that is until I took a job in Florida. Then we saw palmetto bugs which looked amazingly like roaches. One of the houses we purchased was neat as a pin when we looked at it, and when we moved in. Unfortunately, it was roach (palmetto bug) infested. We called the pest man immediately who sprayed and there were dead roaches all over the driveway, house etc.
Unfortunately, it took some time for all of them to disappear. One day I pulled up the pod holder on our Keurig coffee maker and there was a roach as happy as could be. That coffee maker was immediately sent to the garage in a plastic bag never to darken out house again. When the pest control guy came the next day to do so some more spraying, he found out about it, took it and said he would use it. That was fine as long as it was out of our house.
Snakes are not the Blonde’s favorite things either. Our last house had a pool. We looked out on the lanai one day, and there was a large black racer raised up. The Blonde said “isn’t that a snake”? I said “yes it is.” She said “what are you going to do about it”? I replied “what everybody else in the neighborhood does, I am calling Tiny”. Tiny was a retired doctor, but he was also a Cracker or native Floridian.
I called, and he came over, and picked the black racer up by its middle. It turned and bit him in the web of his hand. He commented “Ah, the poor thing is scared”. He then went to dump it in our back yard. I told him that if he did that, the Blonde would never go in the back yard again. He took it over by a pond and let it loose there, so all was well. Unfortunately, Tiny moved, and the next two times we had one on the lanai, I had to take a push broom and sweep it out the door. The snakes were not overly fond of that, but I got them out.
You know the world would be different, if the Blonde had been around during evolving times. I can tell you that there are certain things that would not be here now!
Barry Evans is a Villager.