I fear spiders. Note, there will be no pictures of spiders in this post. You will have to Google them if you want to see them.
I didn’t always fear spiders. When I was a child, I would play with them. Yeah. I know. I had a deprived childhood. But I would hold them in the palm of my hand and giggle as they ran across my forearm. Or I would build little labyrinths for them, which they mostly just climbed over the walls.
All of that changes when we moved to Seattle, and spiders went from being a run-of-the-mill insects (okay, arachnids), to creatures that could necrotize flesh.
Seriously.
My sister was bitten by a spider. I won’t describe how awful it was, how painful, or the scars the bite left.
If you want an idea, go look up brown recluse bites. Yeah. They are awful.
That completely changed my view on spiders, and I went from playing with them to smooshing them. Or fleeing from them, as the case may be.
Then I moved to New Orleans.
In addition to brown recluses, they have black widows. And brown widows. And a slew of other really nasty and unpleasant things.
So, yes, my fear was solidified.
These days, I have two cats. One is a former barn cat. These boys should be able to take out a mere spider, right? Especially now that we live in the frozen tundra, and there are no brown recluses or wolf spiders here.
Yeaaaaah, about that. Apparently, we didn’t set expectations properly.
As I was getting out of the shower the other night, both cats had managed to get into the bathroom. If you don’t close and lock the door just right, they can jiggle it open. And both cats love to join me in the shower.
Whoever said cats hate water don’t know my two.
As anyone who owns cats knows, cats love to get their hair all over you. And one of my cats is a 26 pound long-haired Maine Coon. What better way for him to get hair all over me than to rub up against my bare wet leg?
As I was about to step out of the shower, I noticed a spider on my floor roughly the size of my palm.
I managed not to scream.
But I am in the shower. I don’t have shoes on.
So, I do what anyone else in my situation would do and call for my husband without trying to scare the kids.
He must have heard he urgency in my voice, as he came before I called for the third time.
During this entire process, both cats are simply watching the spider crawl across the bathmat as I stand in the shower waiting to be rescued.
Fortunately, my husband arrived and squished the spider. At which point, both cats had the nerve to be disappointed that the thing was gone!
I swear, those little beasts aren’t worth the cat food we feed them!
Merlin loves water too, he sits in the basin waiting for me to turn the tap on! He’s not interested in spiders either, unfortunately: He prefers flies! I think I’d have had a heart attack if I saw a spider the size of my palm! Thankfully they’re mostly smallish here 🙂
I had a cat, Quinn, who loved stalking spiders, swatting at them, but leaping back if they turned toward him. He was pretty relentless about them, along with moths. Everything else terrified him. Another cat once brought a mouse into the house and set it free. While that cat chased the mouse, which ran at Quinn, Quinn leaped up onto a chair and watched it all from a safe height. All of this was at about three in the morning, of course.