Bugging Out: What Two Insect Disasters Taught Me About Love, Death and Survival by Vanessa Garcia
I’d been with Ignacio for a year when it was time to introduce him to my storage unit. We were doing the thing where you move in together just a few months before getting married.
After the divorce from my first marriage, I’d put my things away in an air-conditioned storage and bounced around for two years, from one artist residency to another, I rented a cottage behind someone’s house, wrote, finished a PhD. All the while, my possessions were safely tucked away in a climate-controlled storage facility in Miami. Or so I thought.
At first, it was kind of fun, facing the unit with my soon-to-be life partner after so much time away from my things.
Toward the front of the unit, there were some props from a theater company I’d owned; a costume I’d worn. “Look! That’s from when I played a Harlequin,” I laughed. And then: a sound. A buzzing flutter. Sure, our hearts were skipping beats with the excitement of new love, but that wasn’t it. This sound was in the room with us. And it was coming from the back of the unit.
We pushed away a few of the boxes from the front, making a trail toward the sound. “What is that? Do you have a cat in here? You know I’m not a cat person,” Igs said. I knew that already. He was a dog person, I’d seen his pictures, which were not stored away, of the pugs he’d had in his life. Particularly the pug that had been by his side when his mother died, which turned out to be the same year my father died.
“That would make me a criminal,” I said, “if I kept a cat here.”
We continued to blaze a trail toward the sound, trying to find its nucleus. The further we inched into the small unit, the louder the sound became.
Until finally: “Do you see those boxes moving?” I said in a whisper, afraid. Above an entire row of boxes at the back, there seemed to be a flickering mirage (ghosts?). We took another cautious step closer, holding hands.
The sound got louder. It was coming from inside the boxes. I extended my hand to touch one of the boxes, which completely disintegrated at the tap of my fingertip, like something made of sand in a Borges short story. And then I screamed, realizing I had tiny translucent-winged creatures all over my hands, crawling up my arm. I ran out of the storage bin, dusted myself off, yelled a horror-film-yell.
They were termites.
Thousands of termites. Millions?
They’d eaten my boxes from the inside-out. They, themselves, fluttering against each other, were the only things holding the boxes up. The boxes were ghosts.
Igs touched another box and it turned, also, to dust. My past, an entire previous life, eaten, digested, disappeared. An illusion.
Ignacio ran out of the unit to join me in the hallway. I was still shaking from the shock. We stared at each other.
“Let’s go to Home Depot,” Igs said in action-mode. I, in a minor catatonia, didn’t respond. “To buy gardening gloves,” he continued. “And something to kill the termites with.”
We drove, in silence, to Home Depot. I can’t remember how long it took or who helped us find the vermin venom, but we came back with the poison, trash bags, and the longest gloves we could find. If we’d had access to a Hazmats, we’d have suited up.
Little by little, we dug our hands into boxes, which collapsed upon touch, grabbing chunks of ash and ruin with every handful. The termites, both the casualties and perps of the disaster, bunched into our fists and crawled all over us before we tossed them into giant plastic bags.
As we excavated through the wreckage, the sound of a thousand wings fluttering our only soundtrack, I saw pieces of my life – micro, dusty remnants only I recognized. A backpacking trip I’d taken with my grandfather when he was 80 and I was 22, where I’d learned my family’s history. The trip to Italy my sister and I took right before my father died suddenly, the same trip on which my sister and I decided never, in our lives, to fight again. Road trips with my ex; an old road Atlas. Artwork given by and others purchased from friends. My own drawings.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I whispered, breathing heavy, full of termites, itching from head to toes. Igs nodded, acknowledging me, but he kept digging, kept shoveling pieces into the bag. Focused, sweating, unflinching.
He could’ve run for the hills, but he didn’t, and it wasn’t just because we have no hills in Florida –it was love. I’d made a mess and there he was, helping me clean it up, even when I couldn’t.
It always mesmerizes me what those termites “chose” to chew through and what they left behind. They let me keep my letters, the handwriting of people I’ve loved, some who’ve passed, writing now their only physical trace. They ate through most of my library, but let me keep all my books on Cuba, which is at the center of who I am, my roots, my work, what I write about.
For days after the wreckage, I would turn to Igs and say, dramatically: “We are dust and to dust we shall return.” He’d laugh, but we both knew I was serious.
During 2020, I thought about the boxes quite a bit as another kind of microscopic parasite multiplied inside bodies, across continents, cutting through lives and changing the landscape of our world forever. As we sat at home, we stared into the eyes of our mortality.
In 2022, the termites came flooding back again when I was at an artist residency in upstate New York, working with my two children and my creative partner, who I own a production company with, while Igs held down the fort back in Miami.
My daughter, not even two at the time, pointed to a window, wordless but adamant. We looked following her pointer finger to find an infinite stream of bugs crawling on the pane, inside the house. My heart skipped a beat, the PTSD of the termite infestation shivered through my entire body. My company partner let out a wild horror-film yell, just as I had done years ago. I recognized it, but this time, I stayed silent, much like Igs once had.
I forced myself to look closer. The critters were shiny and round. When I put my face right up to them, I could see their shells were red with black spots. Ladybugs. A lot of them. We looked around to see if they were anywhere else. They were. Around the light source in the hallway; scattered around the door frames; in the other room; on the walls – they were everywhere except for one corner of the house, which was thankfully where we slept.
My four-year-old son, who is afraid of bugs, asked me to use my magic dust to get rid of them. I carry a good amount of this magic at all times, and I’m usually able to remove obstacles with my invisible potion, because the bugs he fears are mostly figments seen in the dark, right before bed. This time, though, I couldn’t use my mommy magic. My mommy magic became action, instead.
Immediately, I checked the kids for bug bits and bites, their clothes, their hair; their skin for allergic reactions. Then, the internet. After looking it up, it seemed ladybugs were not so irregular in old houses during winter. South Florida girl that I am, I don’t know much about winter, not real winter. I lived in New York City for seven years, but that’s “city winter,” not upstate winter – different problems.
Apparently, lady bugs find refuge in old wooden houses like this when it’s cold, and on the warmer days of the season, like the day they first appeared, they start to come out of the crevices. I guess that’s what it means to “come out of the woodwork.” Eventually, they’ll evacuate the home in spring (that’s the hope anyway). And in the meantime, they usually stay away from humans, which was a relief to read.
After the initial drama of initial ladybug infestation sighting, we’d put the bedding to wash – all of the bedding, from every room in the house, because even if we had no choice but to cohabitate for seven days in this borrowed home with the ladybugs, we didn’t have to co-sleep.
By 11pm, we were all exhausted, the bedding was still wet, and the old house was freezing cold, despite the “heater.” A fellow artist at the residency heard us shivering and came to the rescue with an extra fleece sweater and her yoga blankets. She has since passed away, way too young. I can’t not think of this moment when I think of her. The gift of her kindness. Particularly because she might, herself, have already been ill, and we didn’t even know it.
I wrapped my kids around me in a tight snuggle. As our body heat, fleece and yoga blankets warmed us, and the night started to settle on our eyelids, I thought: Well, at least they’re good luck. That was something else I’d learned. Ladybugs are supposed to bring good fortune, fertility
and love. A blessing. The things we tell ourselves are as potent a recipe for survival as anything else.
I texted Igs, who was concerned about us when he found out, before closing my eyes: “Love you, we’re ok, don’t worry.”
Now this morning, many mornings later, in 2025, when so much has happened, when sometimes it feels as though pieces of our lives have been chewed from the inside out, I woke up from the strangest dream, perhaps constructed from the ghosts of termite-eaten cardboard boxes. I dreamt I was dying, and I knew it. In the dream, I was readying myself, but the thing I kept thinking was: “But I wanted to grow old with Igs and my kiddos. Be a part of my kids becoming adults, growing old. I was so looking forward to that thing. That one thing…” And then, right before I woke up, at the edge of life, I knew it was all a dream. I knew I’d get another chance to do just that, the thing I wanted more than anything else. The enormity of that chance was a gift so huge, that I woke up in tears. And I woke thinking of the termites as a clearing. A shedding of skin. It’s a Chinese zodiac snake-year after all, this year, this 2025, this beast of a year we’re about to shed. But, it’s all about what we do with this new chance at the cusp of yet another year, isn’t it?
We’re not that different than the termites and lady bugs. In the end, nature reflects us as we reflect it. We huddle together, we chew through what we must, but we are also the creature that will go the extra mile, carrying another’s burden, so that they, who we love, might survive.
We wrap each other in blankets.
It’s why Margaret Mead said the real sign of civilization was not language or music or art, but a healed femur. The strongest bone in the body. “This healed bone,” she said, “shows that someone must have cared for the injured person – hunted on his behalf, brought him food, served him at personal sacrifice.” Funny how the tiny termites and the ladybugs have brought me here, to this literal point of reflection, at the corner of gritty love and grateful sacrifice, where survival constructs a bridge between the termite and something so much bigger, something impalpable in its largess: kindness. Goodness. God. Call it what you will. That human spark. Our very soul.
About the Author
Garcia is a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. Her essays and pieces have appeared in the WashPo, The Guardian, ESPN, Narrative.ly, Travel + Leisure, The Boston Globe, National Review, The Hill, and many other publications. She’s reported for the NYTimes and has written for Sesame Street, Caillou, and a few other TV shows. She has an Emmy nomination and two Telly Awards for her work on Sesame Street. She has an award-winning novel called White Light, which was one of NPR’s Best Books the year it came out, and a picture book called What the Bread Says, which has been translated into Spanish and is about to come out in Japanese and Indonesian. Garcia holds a PhD in Creative Nonfiction. Among her theatrical works, she is the author of The Amparo Experience, an immersive hit which People mag called “Miami’s Hottest Ticket.” More: www.vanessagarcia.org
