As though the calendar has some sort of correlation with the weather (imagine that), fall has now settled over my Midwest city. We are still having warm weather, but there’s a fine scrim of cool overlaying the heat. The skies are my favorite – bright blue with big, puffy clouds trundling along with the breeze. The trees are losing their leaves; those remaining are beginning to turn red and yellow, and there’s a constant reminder of their passing: they scratch along on the sidewalk, crunch beneath your feet, drift from branch to ground in currents of air. And oh, how I love fall! I love the return to soups and hearty crockpot meals, the abundance of apples, the appearance of pumpkins on people’s stoops. I love how the sunshine seems just a little brighter, a little more insistent, as though it knows its days are numbered. I love the return of fall television programming and Sundays spent watching football and drinking Octoberfest beer.

But there is one thing I deeply despise about fall. THERE ARE SO MANY BUGS. They have begun their annual pilgrimage into my home and I am Not Here For It. I mean. Okay. Let’s be reasonable. Deep breaths. Bugs have the misfortune of being the creepiest of God’s creations, but they are living beings all the same, right? I can deal with bugs outside – that’s where they belong, after all. Ants, beetles, lady bugs. These are totally acceptable. It’s when they infiltrate my home that I have an issue.

Spiders, I can – grudgingly – live with. If a spider is smaller than a dime and stays respectfully out of sight, FINE. Go on and live your life, spider. (A whole other thing is the quarter-size monsters who brashly saunter across the wall right above the TV and then just… hang out there. Come on. I know you don’t care who wins this episode of Songland, spider. Go outside or at least PRETEND TO.)

You know of my arduous struggle with silverfish. (Which have been mostly eradicated, I think, touch wood. We see them now and again, but it’s pretty rare, these days.)

But INTERNET. We have EARWIGS now. I cannot abide an earwig. Its very name is reprehensible. And have you SEEN those mo’foes? (Did I spell mo’foes correctly? Because my spell check seems to think otherwise but has no alternate suggestions. Way to be a problem solver, spell check.) THEY HAVE PINCERS ON THEIR BUTTS. Anything with a buttular pincer needs to stay the HELL away from me. I haven’t seen one inside yet – mainly I find them lurking on the porch – and, so far, they seem to be shocked and embarrassed to be discovered, and scuttle away into the dark recesses of the wood when unearthed – but even earwigs aren’t going to stay outside all winter, right? Aren’t they just biding their time before they invade the house? I am just waiting to have severe ear pain and go to the ER to discover an earwig has gotten literal about its destiny and lodged itself inside my ear canal.

We DO see centipedes inside. And that is plenty of insect horror for me, thankyouverymuch. I simply cannot handle centipedes AND earwigs. (Are you listening, earwigs?) An unexpected disadvantage to having children means that I have to be all blasé about their presence. We had an enormous centipede crawling across our kitchen like it owned the place – “I’ll just go grab a bagel – no need to serve me, I can take care of myself.” That was the centipede, making itself at home. – and instead of shrieking and then maybe burning our house to the ground I had to be super calm and say, “Oh look, a centipede.” And then I had to calmly and gently explain to Carla that I was indeed going to squish it, because it was too fast and crawly to take outside (I mean, I don’t know if that’s 100% TRUE, but I wasn’t going to test my theory). And then console her, because of course she doesn’t want to kill anything, bless her heart. And thengo grab some toilet paper and SQUISH IT. A satisfying conclusion to the centipede’s presence, yes, but I do not enjoy SQUISHING things. Especially when I can’t go “Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew!!!” and jump up and down. No. With Carla watching my every movement, I have to be super casual and calm about it, like a crawly – and now, surely, ENRAGED – creature with a million legs isn’t about to squirm out of my toilet paper wad and exact revenge on me at any moment.

I… don’t know where I am going with any of this. This has been your Bug Report, I guess. And a reminder that fall, wonderful as it may be, contains hidden terrors. A lesson for us all.

Oh! I do have a conclusion: I called the exterminator and now our house is full of poison, so hopefully we will see fewer bugs in the coming weeks. And NO EARWIGS.