That’s right. I said it. Cockroach. We don’t talk about them often on the Hill, but it is time to speak honestly about these vermin. What these cat-sized creatures lack in fecundity they make up for in shear, individual mass. They are few, but when they make an appearance it is more slow, lumbering crawl then a swarming special-effect.
Well, I took them on in my old house of over 140 years. I sprayed the house with nuclear strength, long-lasting cockroach radiation something from Safeway. I expected to come back from the beach with our house littered with dead critters. Not so.
Two. That is it. Two huge, cat-sized, belly-up, crispy carcasses. A week later another slowly struggled out of a closet looking like a survivor who’d just crawled out of the desert. Then, slow leg wiggling death. Another week later, another single football sized carcass. This has been the pattern. One dead bug a week.
Now I have lived in the low, humid parts of Texas where at midnight the entire kitchen wriggles with herd of dime-sized cockroaches. I was expecting mass-death on a grand scale. No so. It has been a rag-tag bunch of insects. Have I seen any scurrying around taunting me? Nope. Did I make a big deal out of seven bugs, though large enough to have one of my house guests from London screaming in terror upon her visit? Maybe. What I do know is that the cockroaches on the Hill are very much like protesters. They may look menacing, even fierce but in the end, they don’t stay that long or change that much.