As children we find bugs amusing, fellow creatures of the earth to play with and tuck into glass jars with grass (how many bugs have died this innocent death?). Unless we pursue entomoloy when we grow up--and so as not to insult you bug lovers, maybe I should just assume the first person here--bugs become icky and wierd.

I must learn to live with bugs again because they are here in our new place whether we like it or not, and this isn't even the country! We live beneath a very old oak tree, however, and in fact there are lots of trees on our street. At night we are treated to a shrill mosquito music festival; spiders creep, scurry and blip out of nowhere--particularly shocking when one is on the toilet. These are spiders in all sizes, some so small that it is only when I realize one of the periods on my page of text is moving that the spider makes himself known. Often I bump into a surprisingly thick strand of web, sometimes right across the staircase as if they are trying to claim my office for a spider village.

The other night we caught what at first we thought was a young centipede but upon closer inspection of its many-legged, yet worm-like form, we decided it was a larval stage of those creatures known as a Mosquito Hawk, of which there are also plenty--though they sure fall down on the job when it comes to eating mosquitos.

But wait there's more! Lady bugs and wasps regularly dance upon my window outside my desk, while silverfish scurry between books.

And this morning, something tiny and reddish was creeping towards the drain in my bathroom sink...so I helped it along with a nice cascade of sink water :)

I remember reading a story of a family that moved into their dream country home only to find it teeming with brown recluse spiders--the very poisonous kind. After discouraging words from exterminators (they lived in a meadow and there was no way to guarantee an extermination) and attempts to catch them in glass jars, eventually the family decided to try living there with the vow--the first time one of us gets bitten, we'll move. Twenty years later no one in the family had ever been bitten.

So this is the attitude I am taking with the bugs whose home I am clearly invading. As much as I consider them the pests, let's face it. It was their planet first and it will be theirs again after global warming does us humans in.