Early Morning Paranoia

The one room in my house that stays orderly is our bedroom.  (My RBI roommates probably have a hard time believing that, but it is true!)  I make that bed every morning, and I do not make piles of things on the furniture.  There are (almost) never misplaced items on the floor, and if I stub my toe on anything it’s the edge of the dresser, or the bed leg under the dust ruffle, or the corner of the night stand.  Certain Man has an uncanny knack of finding anything sharp with his bare feet, so I am especially careful about dropped pins from my prayer veiling, or anything that could possibly pierce the tender skin on those feet that work so hard, every single day.

So this morning, I was making my way across the bedroom after my alarm went off.  It was somewhat dark in the room, and I didn’t have my glasses on yet, and I felt my bare foot step on something kinda flat and hard down beside the dresser.  I peered at it from afar and pondered what it might be.  It was about the size of a dime, dark colored and I thought that maybe it was a piece of bark that fell out of somewhere with all the woodcutting that Certain Man has been doing for his friend, Gary.  I reached down to pick it up, but when I touched it, it moved!  I felt a leg kinda squiggle under my tentative finger.

Yikes!

“It must be a Stink Bug,” I thought.  “Miserable creatures are such a menace!”

So then I stood for a bit contemplating if it would run away, or if I should go get a tissue and flush it down the toilet, but finally decided the best thing to do was to just pick that thing up and fling into the toilet.  I carefully reached down and caught it between my thumb and forefinger — .

And it was nothing but a dark colored rubber band, all wrapped up around itself that sprang to its healthy round shape in my grasp.  The “leg” I felt was nothing more than the under part of the band where it had been wrapped around itself.  Shew!

I felt relieved.  Then foolish.  Then amused.  And then, because I’ve been wanting to write some more stories, I decided to write it down.  There have been so many stories in my life in the last couple of years that are not mine to tell.  Many are sad.  Some are heavy.  This one is not.  It’s just another story about a Delaware Grammy and her everyday life on a chicken farm in Rural Delaware that has so many stink bugs that I’m getting paranoid.