I Hate Bugs
- Peggy McManus
- Apr 29
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 30
By Peggy McManus
May 2025
My hatred for bugs started one summer day in 1965 when I was four years old. Mom shooed me outside, telling me to entertain myself while she put dinner on.
After looking around the yard a bit, I found a cozy looking ant hill and plopped down on it to play. A short time later, it was time to clean up for dinner and Mom sent my older sister Kelly, aka the troll, out to fetch me.
Kelly opened the screen door to our trailer and stepped outside, letting it slam shut behind her. The noise startled me and I looked up. Oh, it’s just the troll, I thought, brushing a few ants off my face and turning my attention back to my toys.
“Arrrggghhhh!!!”, Kelly screamed when she saw the hundreds of ants crawling on me. In horror, she turned away and raced back to the trailer.
A few seconds later she was back with Mom, clenching at her blouse with one hand and pointing a shaky finger at me with the other. The troll’s screams intensified as Mom ran toward me with a mortified look on her face.
“Oh for Pete’s sake, Piggly,” she said, flicking an ant off my lip. “Ant hills aren’t for sitting on! Kelly, quit screaming and bring me the hose.”
Mom stripped me down and shook an army of ants out my clothes while we waited for the troll to return. The next thing I knew I was hit by a freezing blast of hose water!
“Arrrggghhhh!!!” I shouted.
“Okay, I think I got most of them,” Mom announced a few agonizing minutes later and thankfully dropped the hose. “Kelly, go turn off the water.”
“B-b-but she was eating ants!” the troll cried. “There were at least two in her mo-mo-mouth when I found her!”
I was pretty sure trolls ate things a lot worse than ants, but I was too cold to say so.
“A little protein probably won’t hurt her,” Mom sighed. “Now go turn off the hose.”
By the time Mom plopped me down in a warm bath to drown any ants that might still be tangled in my hair, I had developed a bad case of the heemi-geemies. I squirmed nervously in the tub, swatting at imagined tickles of tiny ant feet on my arms, face and legs. Tears streamed from my eyes. I hate ants!, I thought miserably.
A few months later I had another awful experience involving bugs. This time it was at my nursery school. You might think it’s hard for a four-year-old to do something so unthinkable that she gets called down to the principal’s office, but that’s what happened. My parents were there, waiting anxiously with the principal when I walked in.
“Mr. and Mrs. McManus,” the principal, Mrs. Stern began. “Your daughter has been teaching students how to maim grasshoppers during recess.”
Mrs. Stern was a cold woman who ran the nursery school like a prison. She and her croonies even patrolled the rows of cots at nap time, tapping rulers on their palms and looking for kids who weren’t asleep or, at least, pretending to be. My classmates and I knew that if we were discovered awake in our cots, the rulers would be used to deliver a sharp, painful rap across our knuckles.
“I was collecting bait so we could go fishin’, Dad,” I said. “But those dang hoppers kept escaping so I popped off their legs. It ain’t my fault if the other kids wanted fishin’ bait, too.”
“And now we have literally hundreds of legless grasshoppers out on the playground,” Mrs. Stern said.
“Hmmm, I suppose I should go round them up,” Dad reasoned. “They do make good bait.”
“At this school, we do not harm other living creatures,” Mrs. Stern scolded. “It’s senseless and cruel.” She then turned to glare at me. “How would you like it if I popped off your legs?”
At this I burst into tears. Due to my innocent bait collecting efforts, I was going to lose my legs.
Suddenly, Dad scooped me up and headed out the door. Mom followed close behind. Thankfully, it appeared that neither parent supported the principal’s plan to pop off my legs.
After stopping to collect as many legless grasshoppers as we could, we climbed into the car and drove home. Dad and I grabbed our fishing poles, baited our hooks with grasshopper torsos, and tossed our lines into the creek behind our trailer. The day wouldn’t be a total loss if we could catch a fish or two for dinner.
That was the last time I ever saw Mrs. Stern, but the damage was done. From that day on, I hated grasshoppers.
I should clarify that I don’t hate all bugs. I am actually quite fond of honey bees and the tubby bumblers that come to pollinate my garden. They leave me alone and I leave them alone. I plant flowers I know they like and leave the dandelions in the yard to help sustain them until the summer blossoms bloom. I even delay firing up the lawn mower, but when I finally pull it out, I don’t mow the bees down. Instead I pause the mower at each bee-inhabited dandelion and wait until it moves out of harms way before continuing on.
Hornets are another story. Maybe you read my recent article in Trout Magazine about hornets chasing Mom down a mountainside during one of our more memorable huckleberry-picking excursions.
She had unwittingly upset a gigantic hornets nest causing a cloud of angry hornets to emerge and quickly hone in on her. Mom flew down that mountain with the speed and agility of a gazelle chased by a lion. Luckily, I happened to be by the car when she burst through the brush, followed by the blood thirsty mob.
“Opn-da-ca-do!”, Mom screeched at me. Luckily, I was fairly fluent in panic-speak and interpreted her words just in time to open the car door. Mom flung herself inside and I slammed it shut behind her.
“Ge-in-da-ca, peeeg!”, she screamed, loud enough that I could hear, even though the car’s windows were closed. I leaped into the backseat, pulling the car door closed against the murderous swarm outside.
Mom and I sat there for several minutes, swatting at the handful of hornets that had managed to make it into the car with us. Mom’s weapon was a well worn map of North Idaho. Mine was a rolled up Archie comic. After awhile the hornets were no more and we sat back in our seats to access our injuries.
Mom took the brunt of the attack for sure. Not only was she stung substantially more than me, but she had several scratches and scraps on her face, arms and legs from all the branches and bushes she had dashed passed on her way down the mountain. Still, I had plenty of painful hornet stings to contend with myself. This is, of course, why I hate hornets.
As much as I detest ants, grasshoppers, and hornets, the insect I hate most is spiders.
When I was seven, Mom and Dad bought a small, two-bedroom house with one tiny bathroom. It wasn’t much of an improvement over the trailer our family of five had lived in before. After all, I still had to share a room with my two sisters, the trolls. But the worst thing about the house, by far, was the haunted cellar.
Mom had no fear of the cellar though, and used it to store the fruits and vegetables she preserved from our garden. Every night as dinner simmered on the stove, she sent me down into its dark, windowless depths to fetch a dusty jar of beans or corn, or to pull carrots and potatoes from the boxes of sand she packed them in at harvest time.
“Piggly, run down to the cellar and grab me a jar of peaches,” she might say. “I think I’ll serve them with some cottage cheese tonight.”
“Noooo, Mom, don’t make me go down there,” I whined. “There’s ghosts and spiders and I may not make it back alive. Besides, nobody likes peaches on their cottage cheese.”
“Oh, pish,” Mom sighed. “Stop being silly and do as you’re told.” On particularly rough days, she might add, “and bring up a bottle of dandelion wine while you’re at it.”
I thought I must be Mom’s least favorite kid since I was the one routinely sacrificed to the ungodly darkness of the cellar. With hindsight I realize it was because I was the one slumped over the kitchen table whining to her about being hungry and asking when dinner would be ready. The trolls were smart enough to hide out in our bedroom until they were called to the table.
Those nightly trips to the cellar terrified me. The only light came from a lone bulb screwed into an ancient fixture mounted at the base of the cellar stairs. To reach it, I had to inch my way down the crumbling concrete stairs in complete darkness, feeling along the cold stone walls with my hands until my fingers found and yanked on the string that would turn on the light. But it didn’t do much good. The faint glow from the bulb barely provided enough light for me to identify the food items Mom wanted. It was enough, though, for me to catch glimpses of the shadowy figures emerging from the darkness.
One night, Mom sent me to fetch some canned beans from the cellar. I felt my way down the stairs and waved my hand around in the darkness searching for the light’s pull cord. It was nowhere to be found. Just as panic set in, I found the light string and pulled. The light came on and to my horror I saw a huge, sprawling mass of black widow spiders at my feet.
The scream that came from me was low-pitched, gutteral, and animalistic. I flew up the stairs and slammed into Dad who was secretly watching from the top of the stairs.
“Arrrggghhh!” I gurgled. “There’s spiders! Everywhere!”
“I know! I put them there,” Dad laughed. “Look, they’re plastic,” he said, dragging me by my arm back down the stairs. He kicked at the spiders with his foot and sent them scattering across the concrete floor.
“Man, I’ve never seen you run so fast,” Dad said between spurts of laughter.
“I thought they were real,” I cried.
“Yeah, that was a great prank,” Dad said, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. “Now grab some beans for your Mom and let’s get out of here.”
That was the first of many spider pranks that Dad set up in the haunted cellar. One time he tied a rubber spider the size of his hand to the light string. Another time he tied fishing line to a fake tarantula and rigged it so it would race toward me when I turned on the light.
You might think I’d eventually get used to Dad’s antics. That might have been the case, if the cellar wasn’t a natural haven for real spiders. Dark and damp, with all kinds of cozy nooks and crannies where they could happily wait for me to pop by. The second I pulled the light string, their fun began. Spiders zoomed this way and that, creating elaborate patterns as they skitted along the floor. Others slid down from the ceiling on silken webs, spinning happily above my head and reaching toward me with their long spiny legs. Each night they listened for Mom to tell me which jar of canned food she wanted me to retreive. Then the biggest spider would climb onto the jar I was after and step gracefully onto the back of my hand just as I grabbed for it.
Many a glass jar shattered on that cellar floor on account of those spiders and their idea of a good time.
I’m sure you now understand why I hate spiders. Let me just add that Mom didn’t help matters. If a spider managed to cling to me as I ran up the cellar stairs in a full-bore-linear-panic, Mom took matters into her own hands… literally. She calmly pulled a crumpled tissue from her sleeve and used it to pluck the spider off me and smush it between her fingers.
For me this was nearly as bad as having a spider on me. The experience left me fully grossed out and traumatized. Mom, unfazed, tossed the gut stained tissue in the trash then turned toward my pale green face and said, “It’s time to eat. Call your sisters to dinner.”
Pat's Quote of the Month
"What a tourist terms a plague of insects, the fly fisher calls a great hatch."
McManus Recipe of the Month
In honor of this month's bug blog, a recipe for a cake full of candy bugs seems appropriate. To be fully authentic, make Dirt Cake in a food-grade planter, pack the "dirt" with the grossest looking gummy worms you can find, and serve with a gardening trowel.
"My mother-in-law about passed out when she looked over to see my daughter dig a big red "worm" out of the "dirt" and pop it in her mouth. Talk about a good bug prank..." — Peggy McManus
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Oh, the joy of scaring kids. It's one of life's great pastimes... that is assuming you can live with the consequences.
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Bun makes us feel our years in You Know You're Getting Older When...
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