Peter McKay

For years, we have dealt with all kinds of pestilence around our house. We've had mice, thousand leggers, bats, earwigs and spiders (so many spiders, in fact, that I have developed the habit of holding my arms out as I pass through doorways. Spiderwebs, it turns out, taste terrible). I've always been somewhat embarrassed by this, as I've always thought that it said something about us as a family: We were infected because we were inferior.

This past spring, though, a whole new set of guests checked in to Chez McKay — strange brown insects with backs shaped like shields. They didn't do much at all, just slowly crawling across the wall until we got around to sucking them up with the vacuum cleaner. I almost felt sorry for them, as they seemed to be waiting around for the vacuum the way a person might wait for the bus. I nicknamed them "Suicide Bugs."

I tried everything I could to identify these new pests. I Googled them every which way, searching for "bugs," "bugs that look like shields," and even "bugs that are pretty easy to vacuum." I searched for images of bugs that I'd heard of but never see: cicadas, leaf bugs, cinch bugs and even Japanese brown beetles. Nothing came close. By the time I was finished, I could talk about bugs with great authority and precision, and also learned the hard way that telling people all about bugs was one of the fastest ways on Earth to be left alone at a party.

In desperation, I put one of these bugs into a plastic bag and carried it around in my pocket asking just about everybody and anybody I knew if it seemed at all identifiable. (Turns out there's an even faster way to be left alone at a party.)

Finally, someone looked at my disgusting pocket pal, winced, and said, "Are you really, truly carrying around a stink bug in your pocket?"

"A ... what?" I asked.

"A stink bug," they said. "They call them that because if you crush them, they give off a foul odor.

Also probably why only idiots carry them around in their pockets."

Instantly, I knew that 1) I had found the answer that I'd been looking for, 2) I didn't like it one bit, and 3) I owed my 14-year-old son an apology for all those times I yelled at him to leave the room if he was going to do something like that in our house.

We were used to the shame of living in a house full of bugs, but stink bugs were a whole new, amazingly low, level of disgrace. It was almost as if we'd been told our house had bed bugs or our kids were infected with head lice. What sort of people lived in a house crawling with stink bugs? (I know. I know. People like us.)

When I told my wife that we had stink bugs, she gagged. We still didn't know exactly what they were, but anything called a stink bug, when it's in your house, might make you gag.

The next day, my wife called the exterminator, explaining that we had an emergency call. We were experiencing an infestation of bugs. She held the phone close to her mouth and whispered, in hush tones, that they were stink bugs.

The exterminator laughed at my wife, something I've learned from hard experience is not a good thing to do when my wife is stressed out about something.

"Hey!" my wife barked into the phone. "This is not funny!"

"No!" the exterminator said, "It's just that you and just about everybody else around here has stink bugs. They're what we call outside bugs, and they just come into your house to get warm when the weather turns. There's absolutely nothing you can do about them. They don't bite, they don't get in your food, and they don't chew holes in your clothes. Just wait for them to die."

Since then, life with stink bugs has been a piece of cake. We keep the vacuum cleaner handy, and every time we spy one, we quietly suck it up. We know that it's only a matter of time before these bugs, for whom life already stinks, will be goners.

For my fourteen year old son, who never cared whether we had bugs in the first place, it's actually been a blessing in disguise. Every once in a while, when I sniff the air and grimace, I'll look at him accusingly and call him a pig. He'll just shrug his shoulders, smile, and say, "Sorry, Dad. I must have stepped on one of those bugs of yours!"

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