I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know when it happened. Somehow, without my realizing it was occurring, I became the designated “killer of all multi-legged things that get into the house.”
I never wanted the responsibility. I didn’t ask for the position, but apparently it was bestowed upon me by the democratic decree of the other members of my household. I just wish someone had told me when it was happening so I could have removed my name from contention.
Unfortunately, whether I saw it coming or not, I am now the one responsible for removing all spiders, ants, beetles, bugs, bees, wasps, crickets, roaches, moths, mice, mosquitos, gnats, frogs, flies, centipedes, and even the occasional snake from our house.
Just the other night, I was curled up in bed, not quite fully asleep but already slipping into that wonderful pre-sleep dream state, when a voice from out of the darkness said, “Are you awake?”
Well, I wasn’t awake, and I was about to tell the rude, interrupting presence to go away when I realized for the first time that I wasn’t dreaming the voice. It was an actual voice.
It asked again, “Are you awake?”
I opened one eye and saw a blond head peeking around the frame of my bedroom door. It was my daughter, EM1, lurking in the hallway like the world’s worst burglar. I asked her what she wanted. Or, at least I tried to, but I was so groggy I’m not sure exactly what came out of my mouth.
She said, “There’s a spider in the bathroom. Can you come get it?”
Keep in mind, this is a twenty-three-year-old woman asking me to get up in the middle of the night to kill a spider. I wonder what she is going to do when she is living on her own and a spider wanders into her apartment. Call me in the middle of the night to come over and remove it?
Of course not. That’s a silly thing to even contemplate.
I know EM1 is never moving out of my house.
Anyway, I crawled out of bed and staggered down the hallway to EM1’s bathroom to see the eight-legged monster that was preventing any of us from going to sleep that night. EM1 pointed up at one of the walls, close to the ceiling, indicating a tiny black speck about the size of the fingernail on my pinky.
“Really?” I asked. “You needed me to deal with this right now?”
“I saw it once before, but it crawled away. I didn’t want it to get away again.”
Logical, I suppose. But still inconvenient timing.
I stepped up to the wall and reached up one hand to demonstrate that the murderous bathroom dweller was well out of my reach. “I can’t get it. What do you want me to do?”
EM1 held out a cotton ball in her hand. “Do you want to throw this at it? Try to knock it down?”
I told her that no, I wasn’t going to throw a cotton ball at the spider, and started to explain that her suggestion was utterly ridiculous. That was when I noticed that the floor of the bathroom was littered with cotton balls. Apparently EM1 had already been attempting this odd tactic of spider removal.
“Did you throw all these?” I asked her.
“I was trying to get him off the wall.”
“And he just batted them away?”
She gave me a dirty look.
Shaking my head, I began to look around for something that would allow me to reach up high enough to remove the intruder. I found a hand towel next to the sink and picked it up. EM1 held out a hand to stop me, but instead just made an unhappy noise and said, “Go ahead.”
I guess she would rather have to wash her towel than deal with the spider any longer.
I extended the towel to its full length and swatted the hapless critter on the wall. It fell to the ground in typical spider fashion, landing with its multiple legs curled under itself in the international spider language of “You got me and now I’m quite dead.”
Tossing the towel back on the sink, I walked out of the bathroom to go back to bed.
EM1 tried to call me back to pick up the dead bug. “It’s still on the floor. Aren’t you going to get rid of it?”
“I killed it,” I told her. “You can clean it and cook it.”
I heard little squeaks of revulsion and disgust for a couple minutes, then the toilet flushed. The saga had apparently ended. As I crawled back into bed, EM1 called out, “It squished when I picked it up!”
Yeah, they’ll do that. It’s one of the hazards of spider killing. And I should know.
It’s my job.
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