A Plague of Beetles

For months, I have been killing box elder bugs.

The box elder bugs arrived in October, about a month after we turned down an appointment for an exterminator to spray the outside of our home. At the time, it was an easy no: we hadn’t seen any beetles. And then, one warm day, the entire south side of our house was a teeming mass of red and black bugs. 

The bugs settled on the sun-warmed rocks edging our garden beds and into the crevices of our house before gradually beginning to find their way inside. They piled up by the handful in the corners of our windows, looking dead, but those on the edges of the heaps did not hibernate and instead, meandered inside. 

For months, I have been killing box elder bugs. Though we clean it off often, our woodstove is littered with fried bugs who have flown toward the warmth themselves or been tossed there. Though we wash the linens and scrub down the surfaces, our bedspreads, nightlights, window sills, and lampshades are spotted with perfectly round, red-brown beetle excrement. Though we sweep and vacuum, the soles of our feet are bound to find a stray bug wing, light and crunchy as a dried leaf. Before bed each night, I aim to kill ten bugs, hoping to spare myself the sensation of waking in the night to light movement across my neck or face. In the car on the way to an appointment, I feel one crawling inside my jeans and poke it through the weave of the denim, smashing it against my skin. Each morning in the bathroom, I crunch fifteen or twenty and drop their bodies, wings splayed, into the toilet. The crunch of their exoskeletons between my fingers haunts me.

We were about a month into this repulsive infestation when I realized that Francis might be a bug kid. One morning, I noticed the thrill in his eyes and I followed his gaze to the wall, where a bug trundled across the expanse of eggshell paint. Its spindly legs moved mechanically, its antennae bobbing about. Francis, drool pouring from his smile, nearly fell over leaning for it. 

My son, who has now mastered both his pincer grasp and his crawling, is unstoppable in his quest to get closer to his bug friends. He can spot the geometric outline of their insect bodies from across a room. Like all things he loves, he wants to put them straight into his mouth. I have mastered the beetle extraction–a gentle squeeze of both his cheeks, followed by a scooping finger–and I have googled whether box elder bugs are poisonous to babies (they aren’t). 

Francis has loved nature since the moment he could see far enough to watch the rustling Catalpa trees outside our windows. He loves the skylight in our bathroom and the feeling of wind blowing on his face. He is fascinated by our barn cats and by rain against the car windows. 

His budding passion for bugs is one of many ways that my firstborn reminds me of my mother’s firstborn. As a child, Coyne was a collector of all things that slithered, hopped, or crawled. He built a giant outdoor terrarium in a watering trough and in it, he collected snakes, frogs, toads, and turtles. Inside the house, he tended to a near-immortal green anole named Gandhi. My mom tells the story of Coyne asking her, with awe in his voice, whether she had ever touched a snake that had just shed its skin: he had spent the better part of a morning watching a snake wriggle out of its translucent old skin just to stroke the fresh scales. 

My mother, I learned in adulthood, absolutely loathes snakes. When I learned this, I was shocked: how had she coped with the many times Coyne had come running with a snake, eager to show us the flicker of its tongue or the pattern of its scales?! She told me she was able to suppress her fear and repulsion in order to allow Coyne to nourish his curiosity and joy. At the time, I didn’t understand how this was possible. Now, I can’t stand for Francis to see me kill a bug; instead, I wait for him to be distracted by his stacking cups before I go on my morning beetle-squishing spree. When he spots a bug ambling along, I sit with him, watching, noticing the pattern on its wings and the sheen of its lacquered shell. I watch his eyes sparkle and I begin to understand how my mom did it. 

This week’s bugs are by Erin Hanafin Sweeney, a whimsical painter and small business owner based in Geneseo, NY. You can explore her work by following her on Instagram @erinhanafinsweeney , visiting her website, or by dropping by the Gallery in the Valley, where she is a resident artist.