Call Me Little Miss Muffet

I hate spiders.

I'll face a diamondback or a cobra before I'll face a spider. Snakes don't scare me...I wouldn't want to sleep with one, but not afraid to pick up a non-poisonous one on the smallish side.

But spiders are a different story. I know why I hate them and you'd think I could conquer my fear just because I can remember the exact moment I developed it. I was maybe around four. Mom always planted morning glories in front of our porch, training them up a twine lattice she'd make. Down on the ground in the morning glories, a huge web appeared overnight. I knew it was a spider web, but no big deal.

Then as an experiment, I found a large black ant. I mashed him just slightly so he could still wiggle, then I picked him up and dropped him in the middle of the spiderweb. It was an especially sticky web, so he couldn't go anywhere. I swear, that poor ant barely had time for one wiggle when this huge spider came out of his lair. He grabbed the ant and took off with him to his hideout. That's when I lost my mind.

I took off running inside the house, begging Mom to go get that ant. Of course, she couldn't save that ant's life and she had better things to do than try. So I've been apologizing to the ant kingdom ever since (well, I will admit to also cooking a few with a magnifying glass a few years later). And so it began...my nearly lifelong hatred/fear of the eight-legged varmints. When I picked out the clipart for this story, I had to go with a cartoon ant and not one that looked the least bit realistic. I won't even look at pictures of spiders.

A couple of years ago, I was in my favorite spot--my recliner (aka: "tuffet"). I'm a barefoot kind of girl, so no shoes or socks. I reclined my chair, picked up the remote, and just happened to look down at the footrest about the same time this freakin' HUGE spider climbed over the horizon of the very bottom of the footrest--right by my bare foot! With no husband in sight, and nothing to hit him with I figured I had two choices. It was either kick the spider with my bare foot or have him crawl on me. So before I could think too much, I whacked that spider with my right foot--not mashing him, but sending him flying. He hit the wall on the other side of the room and made a very audible *THUD* when he hit. Then he high-tailed it down the nearest register.

He "bought the big one" a couple of weeks later when I found him in the bathroom as I was getting ready to go to work. Then his corpse went for one of those "swirly" Viking funerals. I don't know for a fact that it was the same spider, but I've got to pretend it was--or burn the house down.

My son called me at work one day to tell me about how he'd put his shoes on that morning and felt a wad of lint in his sock. So instead of taking his foot out of his shoe and removing his sock, he just mashed his foot down to flatten out the lint. It helped a little, but he could still feel the lint after he got to work. You guessed it. It wasn't sock lint--it was one of those huge wolf spiders. And Brian's foot and sock were wet with spider juice.

That story made me so sick that day that I couldn't eat lunch. Maybe I should've taped his story to play back before every meal. Before long I'd be down to my 98-pound high-school size.