Eight Legs

Last week I opened my cupboard to get out a mug and a tea bag, and there was an alarming looking spider on the inside of the door. He was big and brown and had eyes that stuck out. I was told by an old blackjack dealer friend when I lived in Tahoe in the 70's not to kill a spider in the house. If you did, she said, "all of his friends would come to his funeral". Ever since then I've done as I was told, and I never had a problem.

But this guy didn't want to cooperate. I did my usual thing, collecting a big barrel-shaped plastic glass and a piece of mail advertising a congressional candidate, and I set to work. I bravely went to cover him with the glass, but he must have seen me coming and jumped down to the counter. Scampering over to the stove near a burner, the bugger wasn't in a flat spot where the cup would fit, so I opted for a smaller juice glass. He escaped capture again and skittered down the side of the stove and to the back, where I hoped he or she would not start a family.

I looked up his type on Google, and found out that he was called a brown recluse spider. When I looked it up on Google it didn't seem very harmful, but when we had lunch a few days later with my cousins, they were alarmed and told of the harmful poisonous bites that they had heard of by these crawly creatures. I started hoping that the heat of the stove would get rid of him once and for all.

Then, night before last, I was just getting ready for bed, when I noticed another one on the wall of the bathroom next to the wall heater.

I was going to go about my usual method of "catch and release", but Doug called in to me, "Squish him with a Kleenex and throw him in the toilet!" I took a picture of the bug, which was the size of a 50-cent piece, and told him that I couldn't kill anything that big. "Well then, hit it with something!", he yelled from the bedroom. I spotted one of our grabbers that we use in the shower that had fallen off and figured that it had a big enough end on it to do the job.

The spider kept his stance on the wall, peering at me as I prepared myself for battle. I lunged at him holding the handle sturdily in my grip and just as I pounded it on the wall, he dropped to the floor! Unfortunately, the grabber decided to do it's job of clinging to the wall, but I yanked it off, aiming to smash the fleeing spider as it ran on the floor. In the excitement, though, I fell backwards, no doubt bruising my hip, but not bumping my head on anything. I lost track of him at that point and I figured that he must have escaped into our bedroom! I was envisioning having to call the paramedics to get me off the floor, but it seemed like I wasn't badly hurt. I had bounced nicely. I turned over, and got up with the help of the door jamb. Doug went on about how it should have been Him protecting Me from the spider. I just thought about all the nooks and crannies that there were under our bed for her to start her new home. In order to be able to get to sleep, I declared that we shouldn't mention the "s" word any more that night.

In the morning, I looked up the brown recluse spider once again on Google, and found out that it has 3 sets of eyes! Six all together! No wonder he/she could see me coming. I checked the back of my clothes, hoping that perhaps I had fallen on the critter, and squashed it, putting us all out of our misery, but no. No body. Guess we'll have to wait for yet another sighting. I wonder if she'd spot me coming near her with a can of Raid.