BIG Black

Years ago when my husband, Rudy, went on a business trip to Italy a BIG black cockroach following him home. I'm convinced it stowed away in his suitcase. Rudy claimed this was an unreasonable accusation and that the roach could have come from anywhere, but the Utah cockroaches I had seen were smaller and paler in color, so I was convinced it was an Italian cockroach (with ties to the Mafia). Anyway, it was a BIG black cockroach and when I saw it I screamed (swore) and threw a shoe. Of course by the time the shoe hit Rudy, BIG black was long gone.

I went into a cleaning frenzy. I scrubbed, scoured, polished, recycled, threw away, bleached and sprayed   until there wasn't a crumb left in the entire apartment. When a couple of weeks had passed without a sign of BIG black, I started to breath again.

One evening, about a month after the cockroach event, I was relaxing in a hot shower. My girls knocked on the door and said something that I couldn't understand. They sounded pretty excited, so I stuck my head out of the shower and there he was, BIG black! I screamed (swore), threw a boar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, cream rinse and the bath poof, and there he sat, not moving one plastic muscle. My girls were in hysterics (of laughter) outside the bathroom door. They managed to clear out of the apartment pretty quick when I opened the door.

Apparently they had found a plastic fly. When they ripped the wings off it looked like BIG black, so they decided to slide it under the door and see how Mom would react.

It was pretty funny, once my adrenalin leveled off.