While our current Evening Sun reporters are working to bring you our Progress Chenango 2009 special sections this week, I’ve asked five of my favorite ES alumni to fill in as guest columnists. I hope you enjoy catching up with them as much as I did. – Ed.
A serious mountain of half-spent nacho plates and Hungry Man dinner trays has to be left out on the kitchen counter or next to the couch for days, maybe weeks, before any cockroaches come around in Chenango County. That’s always been my experience, anyway. Even then, the Upstate New York roach, usually no bigger than a thumbnail or a Siamese Raisinet, waits until the light’s off to scurry out into the open.
Cockroaches in New Orleans are in a whole other motel all their own: The damn things – known as Palmetto bugs in the south – can grow to the size of Shaquille O’Neal’s foot and will walk off with an entire unopened sleeve of Chips Ahoy in broad daylight, giving you a friendly “How ya doin buddy?” as they pass. I stomped the first one I ever saw. Big mistake. Not only was this roach not crunched to death under the pressure of a 300-pound man’s size 14 shoe, it was unscathed, and angry. Mr. Palmetto immediately pulled out a homemade shiv and forced me at knifepoint to make withdrawals from multiple ATM machines until my bank accounts were empty, and then wrote me down for a half-dozen boxes of leftover Girl Scout cookies – figures, Shortbreads – to support its youngest daughter, who it turns out is a Brownie.
Welcome to New Orleans, where you learn to deal with big nasty cockroaches, and a few other messy things I wasn’t used to before coming down here from Norwich five months ago. Here’s a short list:
-- Humidity. It’s not even summer and I’m rolling through deodorant sticks at a clip of two a week, and on muggy days I still come home smelling like a Whopper with onion rings (Although I can’t say I miss shoveling and scraping snow and ice off my car at 5 a.m., especially with the whoopin’ you guys are taking this year).
