The reason? Just after I got both kids safely in bed, I sat down on the couch to do some reading. Glancing up from the Bible, I saw a great, big, dark brown spider walking across the floor and disappearing under the couch. Although our house is home to many innocuous cellar spiders, it was the first time I had seen something of such ugliness and magnitude. It didn't look like a black widow, so my first thought was that it was a brown recluse, which are endemic around here. (Indeed, last year our pastor & his sons brought a brown recluse they caught on their kitchen counter to show us, telling us the story of how Mrs. Pastor had been bitten, was severely ill for over month, and narrowly escaped serious necrosis of her hand.) I started feeling a little skitterish about walking around the floors barefoot, and started worrying about my kids in bed by themselves with such scary predators roaming our house. I decided to leave the spider to await Papaya Daddy's discretion when he returned home the next morning and headed to bed, where my feet would be safely above the floor. I stood on the couch to turn off the lamps next to it, just in case Scary Spider decided to dart out from underneath and bite my bare toes.
In bed, I thought about how brown recluses like to hide out in piles of clothes and wondered if there were any under the covers. I turned the light on and checked. The bed was clear. I turned the light back off and was on my way to falling asleep when I decided I needed to visit the bathroom. I turned the light back on, looked over the side of the bed before getting down, and saw another large, dark brown spider. This time, the adrenaline hit me like a brick wall. Our house was infested by scary poisonous spiders! I picked up my bedside book and tried to drop it on the spider. I think Jane Eyre must have made some impression (although it wasn't a direct hit), because the spider appeared stunned & didn't run off immediately. I tried to pick up the book to repeat my attack, but the spider had regathered his (her) wits by this time, and ran under the bed. I shakily grabbed a flashlight & a flyswatter, and spend 10 minutes pushing around the dusty detritus under our bed, attempting to deal a death blow to this invader of my safe home. Finally, I succeeded in my death wish. With shaking hands, I used the flyswatter to pull the dead spider out and put it in a dish to show Papaya Daddy the next morning.
Hapless victim of irrational nighttime fears
I still couldn't figure out what kind of a spider it was (especially since it was, by this point, all curled up & covered with dust bunnies). However, both my nerves and my imagination (both of which tend be a bit unreasonable, anyway, when Papaya Daddy is away for the night) were strung sky-high by this point, and I lay in bed with a racing heart, knowing that I killed a brown recluse and that others were probably crawling over my innocent children in their beds, biting their faces pressed so trustingly into blankets and pillows. The Banana had cried when I dressed her in her sleeper before bed - maybe it was because a brown recluse was inside the footie & was biting her. Oh, how I regretted putting a bedskirt on the Papaya's bed. Such a convenient way for a spider to access him. My mind filled with elaborate plans for how we were going to move all the furniture the next day and clean thoroughly under each piece, with one of us grasping the flyswatter to do away with any more Evil Spiders. We would start with the living room couch.
How I wished for the presence of my cousin, the Fearless Spider Hunter, the one who happily lets venomous arachnids crawl up his arm. He could not only identify the spider for me, but would almost certainly lay my fears to rest (or at least attempt to, with the best of his reason and zeal). Unfortunately, nobody was around to quiet my head and so I lay awake for a large portion of the night.When morning finally came, I did what I should have done right away - a Google image search of various types of spiders to figure out what I had killed. Although I could have done without the horrific pictures of necrotized brown recluse bites, I'm happy (and somewhat sad, for the spider's sake) to say that the poor spider I murdered was most likely (as those of you in the know have probably already figured out by my picture) an innocent wolf spider. When I read that wolf spiders come out at night to go hunting (for bugs, not for people), my conclusion seemed even more certain. Even my husband (after initially jumping back about two feet when I showed him the dead spider - he has his own share of arachnophobia) agreed with me.
So, in the brave light of daytime, knowing that my husband will be guarding the house with me tonight, I'm (mostly) sorry I swatted the wolf spider and feel much better about the possibility of cohabitation. And so, brave arachnophile cousin in Virginia (if you read this blog), please forgive me for killing a spider and do your best to lay my remaining uneasiness to rest. Does the above look like a wolf spider? Are wolf spiders a menace to my children? Will they crawl over them at night and bite them? Will they dart out from under the couch to attack unsuspecting bare feet? Should I even bother to remove them from the house, or simply turn a blind eye and try to summon a hospitable spirit towards them?
In other unwelcome visitors news, we finally found the mouse in our garage whose nests I've been destroying and whose food stashes I've been removing in an attempt to "starve" him out and encourage his departure. He got starved out, all right. He climbed through the neck of an empty sparkling lemonade bottle (same size & shape as a wine bottle) in our recycling bin. By the time we found him, he had been there for a few days and the bottle no longer smelled like sparkling lemonade. We decided that some glass bottles are not worth recycling, and felt glad that the trash was being picked up soon.
I much prefer live human visitors in our house.
2 comments:
Typically spiders are not only harmless, but beneficial.
Try telling that to your fellow Arachnophobes Auntie Phyllis and Soldier boy.
I almost stuck my hand on a female Black Widow (black with red hourglass on thorax, females are the biters)
when cleaning out the garage last month.
We had Brown Recluse in FL, they are normally quite small, and are well named. You are not likely to see one, they normally hide in crevasses and out of the way spots.
We have occasional colonies of Banana Spiders, which are quite frightening in appearance, very large with a vibrant yellow color.
But totally harmless.
Do not watch the B horror flick Arachnophobia. Neither of you will sleep for a week afterwards!
Consider yourself absolved ;-). And don't worry. Wolf spiders, like most of 'em, don't actively seek out toes to bite (for that matter neither do the Brown Recluses nor the Black Widows). Rather, they generally only bite when they are cornered with no place to go. Luckily wolf spider bites are not dangerous (with the ever-present, as-long-as-they're-not-allergic caveat); you'll get a large red welt that will go away in a week or so. Wolf spiders are actually quite safe to handle; as long as you don't squish them they won't bite (I've carried dozens around without ever being bit). I actually prefer them to any other spider in the house because they are so non-aggressive, they don't leave webs in corners, and their prey items are things that I'd rather not have around (crickets, cockroaches and such). Thus they are a clean, efficient, and maintenance free pest control system :-).
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