Belle Weather Read Free Page A

skittering around the pool of an oceanfront mansion and I’ve seen their rowdy cousins hanging out in the sidewalk cracks outside the seediest riverfront bar.
    Not long ago, we were at a fancy party given at the home of our one set of rich friends. The house was gorgeous, like something out of Southern Living , which defines high style to any right-thinking Southerner. The buffet table was resplendent with Chantilly sterling, naturally, and as I reached for a cheese puff, I saw little legs skittering across the Battenburg lace tablecloth and heading straight for the carving station.
    I discreetly informed our hostess that there was a water bug hiding near the au jus in her grandmama’s heirloom gravy boat and she might want to get that taken care of. Make no mistake; this is the spinach-on-your-front-tooth in the South. We want to know when there has been a sighting so we can fix it.
    No screams, no squeals, no apologies. The hostess simply plastered a beatific smile on her face, covered the bug with a monogrammed napkin and, in the single most graceful pest removal moment I have witnessed, picked up gravy boat and covered bug, announcing that she needed to replenish the au jus. Nobody knew a thing.
    Southern women are remarkably good at dealing with bugs as long as no one calls them cockroachs. That is simply unsavory.
    I’m personally good at dealing with wasps. One spring day, I opened the windows of my little home office and discovered that while I’d been passing an uneventful winter, killer wasps had been merrily constructing a community so large it deserved its own sidewalks and city sewer.
    The wasps flooded my office and lapped my head like it was the infield at Daytona. I looked for something to spray at them but all that was handy was a can of Lemon Pledge.
    So I sprayed ’em good, but it didn’t help. The wasps continued to buzz, dip, and torture me, plus now they had much shinier wings.
    Finally, I ran downstairs and found a rusty can of Hot Shot, which I sprayed wildly about the room with the door only open enough to put my arm through.
    One by one, they began to sputter and flop, collapsing against the baseboards.
    Of course, it would’ve been a really good idea to close the windows at some point but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d just inhaled most of the contents of a nine-ounce can of Pledge and a can of Hot Shot so old that it bragged about “reducing the threat of polio.” New wasp recruits buzzed around, while, horrifyingly, the “dead” wasps began to come alive again, humming and wriggling. Fortunately, they were hung over, so I was able to clobber them with hubby’s size thirteen basketball shoes, wearing one on each hand like the mittens o’ death. A final wasp struggled to fly in my peripheral vision and I invited it to, yes, go ahead, make my day.
    Sadly, we don’t handle larger pests with nearly as much skill.
    When our cat brought a mouse into our upstairs bathroom late one night, hubby and I both screamed and slammed the door.
    “We can’t just leave them in there,” I moaned to Hubby. “At least turn the light off.”
    “Nonsense,” he said, “The bulb will burn out on its own eventually.”
    This has been our approach to rodent control for years, but there finally came a time when we knew it was time to call a professional.
    A possum, his sides bursting with Styrofoam peanuts he must’ve foolishly eaten while we were unpacking new faucets for the kitchen, had up and died under our house in mid-renovation.
    Possums are powerfully stupid, it turns out.
    In the midst of all the work, the possum had gotten confused and mistaken the packing peanuts for something that could actually be digested.
    Because of his location, in a crawlspace under our house, we had no intention of going after him. He would have to be removed by someone who wouldn’t shudder and squeal and go “Ewwww.” The D boys were out; ever since the rat incident I’d realized they didn’t do varmints.
    So