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Last year: One slow, agonizing step at a time, we're getting the house we paid for. |
Now, fall is my favorite time of year. Easily. No question in my mind. It's when the sky is bluest, the trees are their most vibrantly beautiful, and the garden vegetables are the sweetest. It's time for a wind-up of holidays and celebrations - Hallowe'en, closely followed by my birthday, and then Thanksgiving and Christmas. (Yes, I know Christmas doesn't happen in the fall, but the season begins right after Thanksgiving, so it counts.) Spring is nice, but I love fall.
Except. Fall is when the spiders come out. I. Hate. Spiders.
Usually what happens is, around the second week in October, when everyone's putting up their Hallowe'en decorations, battalions of what I call "harvest spiders" crawl out of their little holes, put up enormous webs all over the place, and sometime around the first week in November, are all eaten by migrating birds. I spend most of October being a little jumpy and wishing that spiders weren't such a big participant in Hallowe'en decorations, because it always takes me a little while to identify the fake ones as such (except for the obviously cartoony ones, of course).
But this year... They're already out. I started noticing them a couple of weeks ago, right at the beginning of September. Enormous webs suspended between trees and the ground on the side of the road, mostly. Last week, we had a web on the side of our porch. If the spider had been just a little less judicious, it might have been across the section where my herb pots are, or worse yet, across the stairs. The web had a big hole in it, so I was pretty sure some bird had already had a snack, but I waited a day or so to be sure, and then took the web down with a broom.
The entrance to my parking log has a sign with the various companies' names on it. Stretched between that sign and the decorative bushes beneath it is an absolutely gorgeous web with an equally showy spider smack in its middle - all done up in bright, primary yellow and black. I have to drive past it twice a day. When the weather is very nice, I leave my windows rolled up until I'm well past it. (Even when the weather's very hot, now, I'm not rolling down my windows when the car is unattended. I do not need a spider in the car.
Ever since the web appeared on the side of our porch, I've been doing a quick scan as I leave the house in the morning, checking for webs. Nothing would freak me out worse than walking into a web first thing in the morning. So as I left this morning, I scanned... And there was a big, fat harvest spider just beginning its web: a single thick strand stretched from the top of the porch down to the ground. I managed to feign being merely disgusted, but immediately every inch of my body started itching.
Matt loves me very much. As I backed far away from the spider, onto the pavement of the driveway where I couldn't be ambushed, he took out his knife, and cut the web from the porch.
Of course, I was watching the spider while he did this, and the Wrong Thing happened. Instead of dropping to the ground and going in search of better, more stable web locations, the elasticity of the web strand had pulled it toward the porch. It landed somewhere on or near the flowerpots I keep my herbs in.
Shit.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
Matt hadn't seen, being occupied with the cutting of the web. I told him about it. Gingerly, (it was a big spider) he looked around the flowerpots. Of course, the spider is brown, and the dirt on the pots is brown, and there are dead, brown leaves at the base of the plants... Matt didn't see it.
Now. Rationally, I know the spider isn't interested in staying in my herbs. Whatever is driving it to build these huge webs, my herb pots aren't sufficient to its cause. It's likely to confusedly crawl around for a while, eventually find its way out, and begin building another web somewhere. Probably on the porch again, where I'll see it, and be able to spray it with bug spray, or attack it with a broom or something.
But the part of me that's afraid of spiders isn't rational. It's convinced that the spider is going to hang out in the herb pots, for days, if it has to, just waiting for me to come out and harvest some basil or mint. And when I do, it'll be ready for me. It might just be there, to scare the bejeezus out of me. Or, if it's a particularly evil spider, it might crawl on me. It's waiting. I know it.
Good thing I watered the herbs yesterday. I'm not going near them again for days. In fact, I'm not going near them again until someone other than me has taken all three pots out of the planter and examined them inside and out and verified the lack of eight-legged critters.
Of course, more rationally, I'm wondering what this early activity means. Were they simply fooled by the cool snap we had a few weeks ago? Do they mysteriously sense that this winter is going to come early or be colder than usual? Or is it all a plot to keep me creeped out twice as long as usual this year?
Word of the Day: feign - to give a false appearance to; to pretend
I already used it in the main entry. So nyah.
Advance Arachnid Activity Aim?
- Anthem by Ayn Rand
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Current Projects:
- nothing
Diet Progress: 13 lbs lost
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