When I lived in the deep south, we had cockroaches.

[Raven]

It wasn't that we were dirty...everybody had cockroaches. If I went into the kitchen at night and turned on the lights, they would scatter. That's what I'm thinking about Washington this week...CIA briefing - scatter! Mueller sentencing briefs-scatter! Makes my skin crawl.

[saidsimplesimon]

1. In Detroit, it was rats first

when I was a child.

[Raven]

3. Well, in your case, the rats are leaving the ship in DC. :-)

[Watchfoxheadexplodes]

2. Fellow southerner

Good point

We also had cock roaches as I look back surprised I survived. My mom insisted on leaving mayo on counter even though jar plainly stated refrigerate???

[violetpastille]

4. Never kill a spider

I'm a Martian that was raised by wolves in a barn.

And they always said, "Violetpastille, don't you go killing spiders. You'll wake up with cockroaches."

[eleny]

6. The best veggie gardens I ever had happened when I stopped weeding so much

The extra vegetation gave spiders a place to weave webs and then they trapped the tomato worms when they were teeny.

We had the most tomatoes when I stopped all that silly weeding. And we attracted the kinds of spiders I never saw before. Some real exotic beauties.

[LuvNewcastle]

9. I don't kill spiders, and I never see cockroaches.

The worst cockroaches are the ones that can fly. Nasty!

[LeftInTX]

15. There are not enough spiders or lizards to take care of roaches around here

Some of these roaches are huge.

I don't kill spiders, lizards or snakes. Roaches live in palms and in tree bark. Huge palmetto suckers that no spider can ingest. At night millions of roaches come out. Millions in my yard. Spider webs? Haah..they can get around them.

Geckos can't control them either. It takes big lizards.

[mahina]

16. Simple Green

Gets them from across the room. Much better than slippers, no squishy gross mess and I always hit em.
Sometimes mid flight!

We call those guys B-52s

[peggysue2]

5. When I lived briefly in Florida, the nasties were called . . .

Palmettos. Big suckers! And yes, they did exactly as you describe--turn on lights and watch them scatter.

The Trump Administration does bear similarities--their aversion to sunlight being paramount. And sunlight is the best disinfectant and/or roach repellent.

Bring on the Light!

[eleny]

7. When my folks lived in Florida I got to witness big "palmetto bugs" that could fly across a room

..... .....

[LanternWaste]

8. I was freaked out the first time I ran into one

Brought up in TX, I thought I knew all about roaches. Spent the summer of '86 in FL and thought "well... we're gonna need a bigger boat" the first evening there when one flew into my hair.

[peggysue2]

10. That's right!

I forgot to mention (or maybe I blocked that out)--they fly!

Ewwww.

[Vinca]

11. I talked to an old lady once who had been a kid in Florida. She said they used to paint

the palmetto bugs at Easter and watch them crawl across the lawn. Ugh!

[peggysue2]

12. LOL!

That sounds like the stories we tell in Jersey about the size of our mosquitoes. B-54s, my father use to say.

[pecosbob]

13. On the Gulf Coast I grew up seeing the really big ones

The mature American Tree Roach or Palmetto Bug...four inches long and can fly a good distance through the air when alarmed. Can scare the wits out of you when you turn on a light. They eat cellulose as adults (hence the name palmetto bug). Very common to find them in palm trees. They're big in Texas.

Hey...Lindsey Graham hails from the Palmetto State doesn't he?

[HAB911]

14. In Florida

If you have a clean house you have clean roaches and or Palmetto bugs, dirty house.........

[Aristus]

17. One of the reasons I'm glad I don't live in Texas anymore.

I HATE cockroaches!...

Seeing them scatter when you turned on the kitchen light wasn't the worst part. It was hearing them scatter. They were large enough to make a sound when they moved.

One of them fell from an overhead heat register once, and hit the floor with an audible *tic!*.

I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night once, and came back to bed to see a huge one crawling across the bedspread. It was so large, I could see its head turning from side to side. I stood up on the floor with the light on for the rest of the night, I was so freaked out.

[912gdm]

18. what freaked me out about them were the egg sacs they carried around

oh god, those were horrible. and if you accidentally stepped on one? I'm dry-gagging just thinking about it