By Kathy Raines

“Thou shalt not suffer a roach to live.” (Exodus 22:18). All right, King James says witch, or evil sorceress. Different translation. At summer’s incipience, as per two-year tradition, I, like one of those rigid old Puritans, stamp out the crusty, scampering evil, my own private Inquisition. I am judge, jury and executioner. Wouldn’t life be merry and orderly without this filthy beast darting across my counter as I pour my cup of morning inspiration?

Are roaches really our enemies, or can we coexist with them, waving hello as they walk across a piece of bread we’re about to fill with tuna salad? “Mom,” my son tells me, especially as he‘s chiding me for spraying Raid in proximity to the toaster or coffee pot, “they really don’t hurt anything. We don‘t get sick.” A friend tells me she’s just gotten used to living around certain roaches; they’re like little pets that need no care. “Hello, roach,” I’ve even found myself saying. Thus, we habituate ourselves.

Roaches, because they scuttle through sewers and the like, carry salmonella and viruses that cause gastrointestinal diseases, as well as provoking allergies, and huge embarrassment. The roaches have to go. I did this thorough kitchen clean-up last year and even called an exterminator some time later. But the 2% or so of them who escaped my attention have reproduced, and my resolve is once more solid. I am merciless. I shake out refugees from a Baggies box and dance–Stamp! Stamp! Stamp!–crunching and squeezing out their white paste.

Roaches have staying power, having dwelt on earth for 350 million years, quite a survival rate compared to our paltry 200,000 years. So they are a tough enemy. Summer’s here and the time is ripe for killing roaches. My overall technique is to empty out every drawer and cabinet, thoroughly washing and spraying them with Ortho Home Defense Max which “KILLS BUGS INSIDE KEEPS BUGS OUT!” keeping some dead for “up to 12 months”. Wow. But the fine print explains that those include “crickets, spiders (excluding black widow and brown recluse)”–gee, those are the spiders I’d most particularly like to oust!–” carpet beetles, earwigs, firebrats, moths and silver fish.” Well, the only ones of those that even rattle my nerves are the wormy, crawly silver fish. I’m rather fond of musical crickets and wish them no harm.

Thus, I’ve resorted to Raid, with its graphic of a crayon-yellow bolt of lightning striking a silhouette of a belly-up roach, yellow eyes open. “Kills on Contact!” it yells. That’s the stuff. And those evil, conspiratorial TV cartoon cockroaches, caught in a spray, yelling, “Agghhh! Raid!!!“ pop into my mind. I’ve gone through two cans of it, and my family’s coughing and complaining of its “outdoor fresh scent”. My procedure, interspersed with coffee, reading, Malcolm in the Middle dog-petting, and waiting-for-the-spray-to-become-innocuous breaks, requires about a week.

Normally, I’m so wimpily tender-hearted that I couldn’t even put a broken-winged grackle out of its misery, yanking my blood-thirsty dog away by her collar while it hobbled through a hole in the fence, where I’m sure another dog or cat finished it off. From time to time, I’ve carried daddy-long-legs outside into the yard or at least felt guilty when I vacuumed them up along with their massy webs, imagining their angst and helplessness as they tried to open up shop in the vacuum cleaner bag. But with house roaches, I’m tough.

I swat errant roaches with the back of my hand or fist them like I’d spike a volleyball and spray them right in their faces. An albino roach waved to me from the sink. I thought, Wow! How interesting! Wonder how many albino roaches exist? Then–smack!–he tumbled to the floor.

Whew. I have scoured every speck of the kitchen now and have set out COMBAT QUICK KILL FORMULA roach traps with a picture of naïve roaches, worshipfully following a golden light within, then calmly exiting. Roaches eat the bait, innocently taking it back to their nest to share with their colleagues, and everybody dies, within hours. Borax is the only substance that truly kills roaches, I’ve read, so every crevice in the kitchen now oozes this snowy powder.

Ah, our household is nearly restored to order. But this order requires constant vigilance. “Did you see any roaches this morning?” I ask my husband. “No, not a one,” he says. The day before, he only saw a few sickly stragglers, deadbeats. But then I spied three hearty beasts chewing crumbs in the dishwasher, and three others in the trash can, licking the yoghurt cups. With a deluge of Raid saturating their bodies and a firm stamping, they are no more. As the illustrious Dick Cheney once said, The insurgency is in its “last throes.”