I was halfway down the driveway on my way to a coffee shop to write this when I had the sudden thought, “I could walk there!” So I braked, drove backwards up the driveway, parked again, and ran inside for sturdier shoes. I put the shoes on and filled my pockets with emergency tissues, but the walk from house to car, car to house, had already made me sneeze, and I figured that if I was going to be outside any more I ought to take an allergy pill, so in between sneezes I took the pill, but I kept sneezing and one sneeze made me pee a little, so now I really wasn’t going to be able to leave the house soon, and then, while pushing the medicine basket back on the shelf in the pantry while wearing the large backpack I’d kept on in preparation to leave the house quickly, I knocked over a bottle of Sweet Soy, Garlic & Chili sauce, and it shattered on the pantry floor.
I cleaned up the sauce and drove all 1.1 miles to the coffee shop.
Anyway, I set aside time this past weekend for a Spider Removal Project. Usually I let the spiders in my room do their thing, but I recently watched one of them bite off a cranefly’s leg and spit it out, and when the leg drifted down from the ceiling and landed on the corner of My Bed, I decided I’d had enough. The removals took at least an hour and made me very sweaty. Deodorant ads go on about Stress Sweat, but what I really need is a product that will address The Sweat of Revulsion. The erratic bouncing of daddy long-legs really gets me in a bad way. The scientific name for this spider is Pholcus phalangioides, and I couldn’t agree more.
I started with the spiders closest to the floor. Even when I hit them with a broom, they would spring up and bob away, and it made me so mad. I repeated the word dominion to myself a lot. Eventually I instituted a new policy that if they survived the first hit, I would “resettle” them instead. Disgusting.
The young singles, I’ll call them, were not bad. I’d nudge them with the broom, they would start running, I’d put the broom in their path, they would climb on, and then I’d carry them outside. It was going fine. Then I went for one with an annoyingly large abdomen, and when I climbed the stepladder I realized it was a mother. With an egg sac.
The worst thing about this mother is that she didn’t try to run; when I nudged her with the broom she just crouched down and got broomed over. I injured several legs, and she kept a hold of her egg sac. I found that the only way to dislodge these mothers from the ceiling was to kind of… sweep the legs. Once this one was on the broom it didn’t feel right to just knock her off into the yard as I’d done with the young singles, so I put her on a concrete step against the house, where she immediately dragged herself and her egg-sac straight into another spiderweb. It’s not a move I would have made, but no bigger spider came out and attacked while I was watching, so I like to think it worked out?
Near the end of the project, an uncooperative young single ran away from me and into a web containing one large individual, one mother with an egg sac, and a pale leftover corpse. The newcomer and the large individual looked like they might fight or something, so I left them alone, but after half an hour all they’d done was face off and vaguely wave their front legs at each other, so I decided to get involved. The one who had originally run away from me started running again when I performed the broom nudge, but it boarded after some coaxing. The other two both went calmly, and my room was spider-free.
The next morning I woke up looking at a big daddy long-legs I’d missed under my desk, and the next night I had a dream that I caught it with my hands and took a thin, blue rubber band and bound the legs together like a bunch of cilantro.