They're Coming . . .

I HATE BUGS. Beetles, roaches, earwigs and all their slimy slug, snail and worm cousins make my skin crawl. Just writing those words makes me itch. I think I've been in denial about the bug situation here in the South. Already I've caught the occasional earwig scurrying through my bathroom and I've found half a dozen roach carcasses lying feet-up next to my air vents in the past month. Nothing close to an infestation, though a tad unnerving. The old house where I grew up in Provo used to crawl with junebugs every summer, forcing me to avoid the entire west-side of the house on some days. And once, as a missionary, we caught a cockroach in our Paris apartment and I spent the entire day bleaching every last inch of counter, cupboard and corner.

But the bugs I'm catching in Charlotte seem more menacing, more creepy-crawly, if that's possible. I find them in my bathtub and I can almost hear them squeaking to themselves in a southern accent "Hey, this place is nahhce. I cayn't wait to bring all mah friends back here for a summer getaway." They'll be living it up in my trash can and bathtub while I get welts from itching my crawling skin.

And just when I'd convinced myself that I had nothing to worry about because it had been more than a week since I'd spotted a bug in the house, the local paper prints this on the front page.

Charlotte is infested by cankerworms. Cankerworms?!? Sounds like a parasite that belongs in my gut, not my yard.

"The cankerworms are tiny, green moth caterpillars. They've swarmed over the city, denuding thousands of acres of its prized willow oak trees, for each of the last two springs."

A coworker tells me there are so many worms that on still summer nights you can hear them squishing in trees and everything gets coated with their stringy worm poop. This is NOT something my new employer disclosed when I took the job. I wonder if I could hold him liable for subsequent bug-related anguish and sleep lost to the squishing of worms outside my window?

"And they're all over: from University City to SouthPark, from Robinson Church Road in the east to Rozzelles Ferry Road in the west. You can drive around town and see the traps, green and black bands around trunks, with messy coats of leaves and moth corpses."

At least now I know what all those black belts are doing cinched around the trees on my block. I've wondered as I jogged by and noticed what I THOUGHT were leaves stuck to the paper. Those aren't leaves, they're moth corpses! On some level, I feared the sticky black bands were in place to ward off some unspeakable evil. My fears have been confirmed.


And the best part is that the tree-belt traps ARE NOT working. So Charlotte will soon spray tons of pesticide over the entire city . . . FROM THE AIR.

Do you think that's likely to make my hair fall out? If it's a choice between baldness or cankerworms, there's no debate.

I'll just get a hat.