Heather and I have been looking at houses. We’ve got a realtor. He drives a Lexus. It has a leather interior. The thing is, and this sounds horrifyingly yuppy, but our realtor lives in the neighborhood we want to live in. He is _the_ realtor for the hood. He only reps the best houses and has sold every house in the neighborhood at least twice. So slack is cut on the whole Lexus-driving realtor thing.
He’s just shown us the best house of the day (that we can afford). It is in one of the pimp neighborhoods. It is, as houses go, the mack. We are stoked, because we didn’t think we could actually get into this neighborhood, much less find a place this nice. The yard is nice. The rooms are nice. The woodwork from the 1920s is nice. But the most nice thing is that there aren’t that many Box Elder bugs around the foundation or windows. This time of year, Box Elder bugs replicate like zygotes perform cell splits. They are everywhere, particularly doors and windows. So we are happy about the no Box Elder bugs, as at a previous house we were shown, they were all over the back door area and Heather may have jumped 10-15 feet when she saw one of them take off and start flying towards her. Following that incident, we had a decidedly anti-Box Elder bug slant to house hunting.
We are in the Lexus driving to look at other homes, and I decide to take a celebratory “hey-we-may-have-found-the-house” drink of my lukewarm Coke. I am riding shotgun, Heather in the back seat, dreaming of paint colors, tile choices and possibly how the three kids will cope and where we will put them, once we have all three.
Suddenly, mid-swill, I detect a foreign body in my mouth, from the Coke. I realize that this is not normal. I’m in the front seat of a Lexus, with _The_ Realtor, and I must keep my shit dialed. Momentarily, I think I’ll try to just swallow it and we can all move on to happier times. So I swallow a teaspoon of the soda, and damn, that foreign body is big. I can taste the flavor of the foreign body. I can’t tell if it is moving, but I can feel a certain anatomical familiarity with my tongue. The terror builds. There is a large bug in my mouth. I calmly reach over and depress the window button. The window is taking it’s sweet ass time dropping, and I’m starting to get a little panicky. The window gets three-quarters down and I can’t hold it in any longer and I’m spraying out, not spitting, Coke and what appears to be a living Box Elder bug all over 1300 East.
