I don't like spiders and snakes

I don't like spiders and snakes.  I don't.  I come from it honestly.  My mom is horribly afraid of snakes and my dad hated spiders.  I tolerate snakes better than spiders, though.  Mainly because I have less run ins with snakes than with spiders.  I don't tend to find snakes in my house  (Though there was one time, back in high school days, that there was a tiny snake in our house and my mom wouldn't come inside until we found the little guy and got rid of it) or in my car or in my yard even.  Those spiders though, then seem to think that they pretty much are allowed to live where the heck ever they want to.  If I were a spider I might think the same way.  However, I'm  not a spider.  I'm me.  And I don't particularly care for spiders.  I know that they serve a wonderful purpose in our environment and that they have been around longer than I have and will survive longer than I will.  I can't help it.  I still don't like them. 

Up on the flatlands, away from the mighty river, where there isn't as much vegetation around, there aren't as many spiders.  Not once, while I lived up north, did I have spiders living in the mirror casings on my car.  Not once did I have the urge to strap cans of bug spray to my hips, like a gun slinger, and protect my property from invading hoards of spiders.  Oh, they were up there alright.  I think they are everywhere.  But here, in the River Hills country, they abound in bountifulness.  They interact with me on a very regular basis.  And they've given me some pretty interesting experiences over the years.

I do have a lot of spider stories.  There was the one that froze me in my spot at a friend's house in high school.  They lived right beside the river and there was a spider in her bedroom that was so large that her dad had a hard time getting it into a large mouth mason jar.  I may have been frozen at the sight of that beast, but my friend grabbed my arm and literally pulled me from the room, screaming for her dad when she saw it.  Still gives me chills when I think of the size of that thing.

There was the time that I went to wake the boys up early one morning.  I reached up to pull the wooden pull on their ceiling fan, to turn the light on in their room, and instead grabbed a spider that was hanging there.  Instead of being woken by the light turning on, the boys were woken by their mother screaming and screeching in their bedroom.

When the boys and I lived on the farm, there was once a spider above the shower in the bathroom.  I couldn't reach it.  And, me being me, I couldn't just leave it alone.  I got my bottle of spray and sprayed the poor thing.  It fell into the bathtub, where it seemed to have died.  I took some tp and picked it up to flush it down the toilet.  As the seemingly dead spider floated in the toilet, I flushed and turned to walk away.  As I turned, as the water started to churn in the toilet, the spider lept from the toilet and towards me.  I screamed and danced around in circles, swatting at the spider, who was swinging madly around my legs, dodging in and out, following me as I circled and danced and screamed in the bathroom.  I continued that little dance for a while, until I finally realized that the spider really was dead.  That I had managed to entangle myself in his web.  That I had in fact pulled him from the toilet myself, by turning away and pulling the web string with me, that was attached to the both of us.  That, however, was quite a memorable experience, thinking that a spider had come back from the dead to attack me from my own toilet!

There are more spider stories that I could share with you.  Lots of them.  But, we'll skip ahead to yesterday.  To my car, where spiders live in the rear view mirror casings and decorate my car with webs on an almost hourly basis.  We have found a peaceful co-existence, as long as they exist outside of the car.

On the way to take the boys to school yesterday, Jordan informs me that I had a crack in my windshield.  A conversation of  "where" and "I don't see it" and "right there" and so on ensued.  Until I said, I think that's a spider, not a crack.  And Jordan said, if that's a spider, it's inside the car.  And then said, oh yeah, it's a spider.  Which lead me to tell him to kill it.  (It was on the inside of the windshield on the passenger side.  He was the passenger.)  Being the brilliantly gifted child that he is, he reached right up there and smushed the spider and smeared it all over the inside of the windshield.  As I complained, he shrugged his shoulders and said, you said to kill it.  Sigh.  So I did.  I just envisioned a dead spider outside of my car, not decorating my view of the road. 

And so it goes.  I don't like spiders.  I'm pretty sure that they don't like me.  I work on trying to not to kill them, but like the one who dangled from the ceiling fan, presenting itself in the semi-darkness of early morning to be a large wooden bead, sometimes it just happens.  Yup, I'm pretty sure that spiders don't like me either.  If they did, they'd do all that they could to avoid my path, my house, my car, and myself.  Instead, they and I live a not so harmonious co-existence, where weird things happen and Jordan ends up washing my windshield.  And so it goes.