The One with the Massive Spider Invasion

I’m actually a very brave person.

I’ve been stalked and barely blinked an eye. I’ve faced life altering medical emergencies and had to make tough decisions since I was twelve. I’ve slept without a nightlight for at least the past thirteen years. I’ve remained silent under torture (okay, I actually just stepped on a lego and didn’t make a big deal of it… Same thing). Heck, I’ve potty trained twins and let me tell you, that’s not a job for the faint of heart!

Yes, I am a terribly brave woman. Just remember that as you read this story.

I don’t like it when my husband has to stay away due to business. What wife does? It always makes me very tense when I can’t press my unusually hot feet up against his somehow much cooler legs as I’m drifting off to sleep. That’s where I was on Monday night: home alone, restless, just trying to get comfortable in bed.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large dark spot in the wall corner behind my nightstand. Curious, I peered at it through the darkness. It wasn’t until this blotch, the size of a silver dollar, moved that I realised I HAD A MASSIVE SPIDER TAKING UP OCCUPANCY IN MY BEDROOM! Now, I can deal with spider when they’re normal sizes. You know, the common house spider that makes lesser women (and men… you know who you are) squeal in terror. That’s not an issue for me. But I don’t really feel that way WHEN SHELOB IS ACTUALLY TWO FEET AWAY FROM MY FACE!

So like any completely normal person, I fled the bedroom and closed the door behind me, determined to sleep in the living room. The rational part of my mind knew that doors didn’t keep spiders at bay, but I’ll be honest and admit that I wasn’t really “thinking” at this point. Fight or flight instinct.

I posted a plea to facebook, asking my friends what I should do if there was a large, potentially dangerous spider invading my house. Unfortunately, I’m friends with a bunch of comedians. No, guys, burning down the apartment is never a good idea. I called my brother, hoping for some sage advice from the Boy Scout… who just told me to go in there and kill it.  Yeah… like THAT’S going to happen!

At this point, I noticed a different spider on the floor in the living room. Surrounded by my enemy, I lost it and just started crying, to my great shame. I called a non emergency police number.

“Hi, this is going to be an odd question. But do you know who I could call if I have a dangerous spider in my house and I’m too panicked to kill it?”

The pissed off lady on the other end huffed and replied, “You’d have to call and exterminator and they’re, like, all closed. And if this is a medical emergency, you have to call the hospital.”

AND THEN SHE HUNG UP ON ME!

Never had I felt so alone. As I stood on the coffee table (how else do you keep away from scary spiders?), I put out one more desperate phone call to the maintenance office at my apartment complex. God bless that poor, confused, young man who had to deal with the sobbing mess that was me on the phone as I begged him to come rescue me.

My hero, the maintenance man, arrived just in the nick of time. He squished the living room spider and I began to show him towards the bedroom where the other spider lurked.

“Oh hey, is that him?” he asked as we passed through the kitchen.

I looked and saw YET A THIRD SPIDER on the wall in my kitchen.

“No… that’s not. I didn’t even see that one.”

“Oh cool. Practice!”

The kitchen spider dealt with, we approached the bedroom. The maintenance hero frowned into the dark. “There’s a lot of stuff in this room, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it.”

I hovered in the doorway and pointed at the corner where I had last seen the beast. “He was in the corner there.”

“Well, they do tend to move pretty…. Whoa! Nope, here he is. Can you get me some paper towel? Actually hold on…”

He took off his boot, muttering that the spider was too big for paper towel, and squished it against the nightstand before cleaning it off. I almost lost my dinner.

“That sure was an ugly one. Don’t quote me on that, but that may have been a black widow. I’ve seen a couple of them around here before, but that was a little big. Still looked like it though.”

I’m fairly sure that my hero was laughing at me the entire time, but I don’t think I have ever been more grateful to have a stranger in my home. He told me that I could call anytime something like this happened again and left with a grin on his face. I didn’t sleep all night.
   

So that is the story of how I, a very brave woman who likes to think of herself as the less in shape Natasha Romanov or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was turned into a huge wimp by a bug.  My dignity is gone.  So much for being a Navy Wife!  I can’t even defend myself from arachids when my hubby is gone!  But in my defense, it was a really huge spider.