Creepy, crawly critters stalked us that night in 1968 when we stayed at the mission church’s attached apartment in the southern desert of Arizona.
“To begin with, we had an invasion of flying ants in the church. Nasty things,” my mother wrote in a letter to my grandmother. A whirling, mass of black flies buzzed us until the calvary arrived: Big, fat, gloppy, brown, desert toads flicking their tongues as fast as they could to devour the droning horde.
With toads feasting on the flies, we hauled the mattress out of the bedroom and carried it around the outside of the building to the kitchen the church shared with the apartment. My sister and I planned to sleep in the kitchen that night.
We couldn’t carry the mattress through the door connecting the two rooms – it had been nailed shut long ago to keep out the prying eyes of parishioners.
On their side of the useless door, my parents settled down to sleep on the padded box springs we had left behind.
Parents may sleep in strange surroundings, but teenage daughters, camping out in the kitchen on a mattress, have other plans for their night in the desert – plans like sneaking our first drink of coffee from the church cupboards, writing letters to friends and family back East and reading books until the wee hours of the morning.
Okay, mission churches in the middle of the desert do not afford many opportunities for wild and woolly living. We settled down read and write.
Quiet descended. Absorbed in a lengthy letter, I did not notice the six-inch, demon insect stalking across the floor to us – but my sister did.
She woke my parents with her terrified scream, ‘Ma-ma, Mama!’
Stuffing their feet into their shoes, my parents stumbled out of the bedroom into the desert and around the building to the kitchen door. They found me standing on the mattress, silently watching my screaming sister as she pointed at the menacing, crayfish-looking creature.
My dad threw one of his shoes at the monster – and missed.
He threw his other shoe – and missed, again.
The devil insect ran for cover – under our mattress.
Mom cautiously leaned forward and turned back the edge of our shared sleeping bag – revealing the night stalker with its wickedly pointed tail.
Dad reached down and grabbed one of his shoes. This time he held the shoe and whacked that frightful critter dead.
My sister cried and shook with fear.
To calm her down, my mother found some aspirin for her and gave her a novel to read.
“I am not going to sleep,” my sister declared.
My actions declared no ornery looking critter could terrify me, but as the big sister, I dutifully kept alert for more creepy crawlers.
Through the rest of that long night with the kitchen lights burning, we heard critters scurrying loudly in the adjoining store room – probably rats, but we did not leave our mattress’s island of safety or our books to verify that assumption.
When a mouse tiptoed into the room, we snapped our fingers loudly at it and sent it back to its hole.
Before dawn came, sleep conquered fear and my sister slept. Not me, I drank coffee, stayed awake and read – two novels. And, not because I was scared or anything – but because someone had to keep watch against creepy crawlers critters and things that go bump in the night.
The next day we returned to our critter free home in the city, pulled out a dictionary and decided we had seen and killed a six-inch scorpion with its poisonous, stinging tail.
“After that,” my mom wrote, “everyone figured that they would visit the mission but we would rather sleep in town.”