Or WHAT A WIMP!

Insects have invaded our house. I first noticed them a few weeks ago, a few here and there, some sort of weird brown beetle clinging to our window screens, the occasional one buzzing around the kitchen light. They floated around the periphery of my consciousness, enough for me to notice, but not enough to cause any alarm. Then they started creeping closer, zooming in on me as I sat at the kitchen island eating my meals, several each day. It was like in the movie The Birds where one crow would land on the telephone wire, then another, and then an entire flock would converge… But I still didn’t feel any danger — until last night, when I was relaxing in my arm chair beside the fireplace and saw them swarming out of the wall.

I freaked. Okay, I confess. I do NOT do well with insects, at least not this type. My worst nightmares involve cockroaches, especially those big palmetto-bug types. They make me shudder, leap on the table, run screaming into the night. True, these brown beetles weren’t cockroaches, which made them marginally better. But they were invading my house.

As you might have guessed by now, if I were the heroine of a novel, I would not be the kick-ass type. In fact, I’m more likely to move out of the house than battle insects mano a mano. But I also knew that these bugs weren’t going to go away on their own. I had to deal with them if I wanted them out.

So, repeating my mantra that THESE WEREN’T COCKROACHES, I bravely captured a couple in a plastic cup (Ew! Ew! Ew!), put them in a (sealed!!!) baggie, and raced down to the county extension office. The expert there happily identified them as brown marmorated stink bugs, recent illegal immigrants to the U.S. from Asia. They were first discovered in Pennsylvania a few years ago, and have apparently now moved south across the Maryland border to my back yard. Fortunately, they aren’t harmful — as far as anyone knows. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do to get rid of them except vacuum them up and then seal all the cracks in the house to keep the newcomers out, sort of like building a wall across our border — and just as unlikely to work. According to the expert, spraying isn’t worth the effort and might even make the problem worse. And I obviously don’t want to crush them.

Ironically, I’m scheduled to talk to a high school English class today on characterization in novels and this stink bug invasion sadly brought the deficiencies in my own character to light. And since I’m sitting here writing this blog instead of vacuuming those marmorated suckers up, you can tell that I’m still acting like a wimp. In fact, I’m avoiding the entire living room! Pathetic. Not the kind of woman we like to see in our romance novels, hmm?

So, off I go to lecture high schoolers on the evils of wimpy heroines. At least I’ve got that characterization right…