Ladybug, Ladybug

Dark dots on shiny lacquer.
Eye-popping planets
Backed by a blanket of red.

As a child, I held ladybugs in my palm with tender fascination. I gasped at my good luck when one landed on my shoulder. I remember designing my favorite 6th grade art project, a ladybug kite, which was featured on the cover of our school’s magazine. As a middle-schooler, I would redden with righteous indignation when callous friends would chant, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children will burn.” Did my love-bug deserve such a heartless fate? We were part of a secret sisterhood, the ladybugs and me.

Twenty five years later, Steve and I bought a house. We were thrilled with the cathedral ceilings and tall windows. The rooms provided airy views of the greenery outside. We could hardly wait to move in.

When the awaited date arrived, we raced into our new home, up the stairs to the master bedroom, and directly into a scene from a Hitchcock film. The Ladybugs clung to the windows like a mat. They shaded the room, trickled onto the windowsills and collected in the corners by the ceiling. Dead ones lay like tiny soup bowls on the carpet. There were hundreds of them, creeping, clinging and clustering everywhere. We looked at each other in terror and simultaneously blurted, “Oh my G-d!”

What to do? We ran from the house and called the previous owner. “Oh, yeah. Those?” he offered nonchalantly. “Those are some kind of Asian ladybug. They live in the mountains during the summer, and they winter here, in the lowlands of Bellevue.”

Over the years, ladybug problem did not subside. When flicked, picked up, or threatened, they emitted a sour, celery-like smell, like a mini-skunk. I was mortified later to find out that this was the smell of their pee. On winter days, ladybugs could be found in our sheets, dining at our table, littered in the vents and between couch cushions. Countless times, much to Steve’s dismay, I jumped, squealing, from our bed at 2 a.m. and swatted a ladybug from my eyelid.

Our neighbor, who was apparently plagued with the same problem, told a story of a nearby church, where ladybugs had clustered by the thousands inside the steeple, and dropped like a chandelier in “Phantom of the Opera” on a group of horrified parishioners. Whether or not the story is apocryphal I do not know.

I called Molbanks garden store. “Wanna buy some ladybugs?” I asked, hopeful that I had struck bug-gold. The per-ladybug payola was considerably less than the effort it would have taken to corral them. The best, non-pesticide solution, I was told, would be to seal off any crevice or cranny they might be coming in from. And as for the ladybugs that did squeeze in…. “just vacuum them up.”

We duct taped the door leading off the master bedroom to the deck. So much for our luxurious Sunday morning respites, but it seemed easier than replacing the door. After seeing an article in Better Homes and Gardens that quipped, “Ladybugs are recognized as the international symbol for good luck,” I realized that my next course of action could engender some seriously messed-up karma. However, our need was dire.

So, we bought a rechargeable Dustbuster. We battled daily with the intruders, sucking them into the abyss, and dumping the remains off of the upstairs deck. As I’d knock the carcasses out of the container, a few dizzied bugs would careen recklessly away, oblivious to their near-death experience. I did not dispose of those tiny-winged souls lightly. But it was them or me.

My daughter, Marina, witnessed the ritual one day. “Why are you throwing them away?”

"Oh, they’re okay,” I replied guiltily. “They just want to go outside.”

“Are they dead?”

“What? No!” I exclaimed a bit too hastily. How many moms, when faced with that same, “Did you kill that spider?” question have come clean?

One day, I noticed Benji and his sister playing in the empty bathtub. They appeared to be talking to the tile and grout. “Don’t worry little guys. We’ll save you,” they whispered to their invisible friends.

On closer inspection, I noticed they had collected a crew of ladybugs onto the bathroom windowsill, some alive, some dead. They had established a sort of petting zoo. The sour-celery smell hit me, and I reeled, “Alright, that’s it. Wash hands.”

I found that Marina had been creating a ladybug refugee camp of her own, storing them in the ceramic cups and pot of her tea set. She would show me the bug in the evenings, feeling it was safe as the hand-vacuum was out of juice, and I would warn, “Honey, I don’t think he likes it in there.” The next morning, as proof that “he liked it,” the captive creature would still be there, unable to have scaled the walls of its tea-prison. Of course, it wasn’t moving at all.

I’ve come to terms with sharing my house with the critters. The key, I guess, is to get rid of them as quickly as possible each winter when the sun comes out, before they breed like….well, bugs. But still, one of Marina’s favorite stuffed animals is a little ladybug. Sometimes, she rubs the heart sewn on its tummy and kisses it, and I smile at her in a conspiratorial, ladybug-lovin’, nostalgic kind of way. Until I come to my senses. Then, I have to fight off the urge to get out the Dustbuster.