Stink Bugs

Stink Bugs

I was emptying a box the other day to get ready for a reading I was doing. Hopefully. Things these days feel very tenuous. Finding out I have cataracts and trying to schedule a procedure also has something to do with my mental makeup. Everything is cloudy and on hold.

Anyway, in a corner of the box was a dead stink bug. Who knows how long it’s been there! It’s not like I was unpacking the Dead Sea Scrolls but, yes, it was back stock of my books. It’d been a minute. A Chicago minute. (I’ve been in Michigan now for about 4 years, time flies.)

The last time I saw some of these books was packing them up to leave Chicago and wondering if my writing life was going to continue. Inventory is always about how much do you think you’ll need/want. It was hard to imagine going through so many copies of Orphan Girl and some of the other titles, but I packed them all into a U-Haul and trucked them to Okemos, Michigan where who knew what was next!?

So, this was a Chicago stink bug? Not sure. It could be a Michigan one that crawled in there and died. Which led me to wondering about all the places desiccated stink bugs show up:

window sills
shag carpeting
dresser drawers
attics

My daughter asked to borrow my Dust Buster and brought the cannister back full of fuzzy carcasses. What were you cleaning out?! Tut’s Tomb!

We’re connected by stink bugs. They’re everywhere. Ubiquitous. Hiding out in the corners of our life. Remnants of my decades in Chicago, witness to my writing life, reminders that some things never change. Like Post-It notes, pins in a map: The dead stink bug is here to tell us life goes on—or at least a piece of us—a legacy left for others.