Flies and La Cucaracha
Thank you all for giving me grace this week and allowing my
posting to be a little irregular. I am slowly catching up on life and sleep. I
still haven’t fully unpacked yet, but I’m getting there too. It’s the strangest
things that are reminding me of Guatemala.
(The above photo has very little to do with this post. But I am a better photographer of things than people, or apparently cockroaches. But it was taken in Guatemala, and there are pigeons, which can be kind of pesky, like flies and roaches.)
Walking up the stairs to my room the other day, I saw a black spot on the
wall. I didn’t know what it was. Standing to stare of a minute, I realized it was a fly. A fly on the
wall. And then I remembered the flies.
It’s not like all of Guatemala is covered in flies. But
there were a couple of times where flies just seemed to be around. A lot. We
got out of the van to visit a house. When we got back in, it looked like a
dozen flies had decided to hitch a ride on the ceiling.
Food is always covered to keep the flies at bay. The fruit
bowls at breakfast. The horchata at lunch. Bread baskets. Anything really that sits out and might
attract flies is covered with a cloth like a tea towel.
Really the only bug or pest I saw other than flies was a cockroach
that spent the day in my room. I danced and sang “La Cucaracha” for him. (OK
not really, but I should have.)
Before I left for Guatemala, I was at the local dollar store
picking up a few things. Don’t even knock the dollar store. Anyone who has ever
lived a gypsy life out of necessity knows that the dollar store is a lifesaver.
Everything for just $1. You can get all the things you need. Sure maybe it’s
not the right brand. And OK, so they sell candy in little tiny proportions, but it’s
only 1 buck. What’s a 100 pennies
really? You know if you went to the big store (I’m looking at you Target), you’d
find all sorts of things you didn’t go in for and decided you had to have and you wouldn't walk out without spending fifty $1 bills. At the dollar store there is no danger of
spending $50, unless you’re buying 50 things, and I have yet to find 50 things
I need at the dollar store. But back to my story.
I was at the dollar store the day before I flew out to
Guatemala and there in the front of the store was a display for cockroach traps
and repellent (which I didn’t even know existed). But here in front of me was an entire shelf
of cockroach remedy. And I laughed out loud.
You guys, I have lived in the great state of Oregon
practically all of my life. I have never, not once, seen a cockroach anywhere.
Not in the entire, all 98,466 square miles of this state. Cockroaches don’t
live here people. They just don’t. You can take my word for it. I’ve had my
fair share of experiences with cockroaches.
When I was in 7th grade and living in Georgia for
a little while I despised the flying roaches. If I so much as saw one
hiding in the drapes, I turned around and left the room immediately. I figured
it was best to live and let live. And that philosophy is probably why I left
the roach to lie on its back in my bathroom in Guatemala all day. But that only
works until bedtime.
You see, I once stayed with Mama in a room at the Carson
McCullers house. (As in the “Heart is a Lonely Hunter” Carson McCullers.) It
was a September evening. We were sharing the only bed, a queen. I was sound
asleep when suddenly Mama was throwing all the blankets off the bed. I bolted
up, startled by her panic. It was dark. I couldn’t see much. But she was screaming something about how a roach crawled over her as she slept. Neither one of us got much sleep that night.
(And for the record, that’s only #2 in the top stories of things that make Mama
and I scream at night. The story that gets top billing really takes the cake.)
So I’m in Guatemala and getting ready for bed and I see the
roach still laying on its back, only about six inches displaced from where I’d
seen him that morning, I knew then that I had to do something. I rolled up my sleeves and did the thing I’d
seen my dad do hundreds of times whenever us girls call him to exterminate the
spiders in the house. I grabbed a tissue, pinched the roach and flushed him
down the toilet. And I went to sleep
without a problem.
In the end, maybe buying the roach traps at the dollar store
wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. You never know when you’re going
to encounter La Cucaracha.
