A most revealing Halloween story
If you know me well, you know I don’t especially care for creatures that skitter, slither or crawl, which translates to snakes, mice and spiders. I really detest snakes, and I just can’t tolerate mice. And then there are spiders ... I think I’d take a room filled with snakes and mice before I’d deal with a spider.
Don’t misunderstand. I don’t want to hurt any of them — I don’t want to set mouse traps; I don’t want to chop up a snake with a garden hoe; and I don’t want to stomp on a spider. Actually, all I want is for them to leave my house, my yard and myself alone, so I don’t have to take drastic measures. Perhaps that’s why I dislike them all so much ... I can’t just ignore them, which means I have to eliminate them, kill them. Since I’m not fond of killing anything, their presence poses a real problem.
Sometimes just the sight of a spider sends me reeling. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen one of those tiny spiders crawling on my wall, and I just have to look the other way. Occasionally, my cat will find an equally small spider on the floor, and inside, I secretly hope she’ll play with it and bat it around so much, it will just give up and leave ... or die. You know my phobia of spiders is fairly bad when I put the cat in charge of pest control ...
And so it was the other day when I was having this long chat about this year’s harvest with an area farmer. We were standing next to his cornfield, and as he pulled back the husks to show me an ear. I spotted this huge (OK, it was about the size of a quarter, maybe a nickel) on the guy’s cap ...
“Uh, you’ve got a spider on your cap,” I said, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice. Instinctively, I took a couple of steps away from the farmer, who was still talking and pulling back the husks on the corn. No kidding. It was like he didn’t even hear me. He kept talking about the corn, the moisture level, the maturity, etc. It was like the word “spider” didn’t even register.
“Uh, that’s a pretty good-sized spider up there,” I said, ignoring his banter about his corn. “I don’t know what kind of spider that is, but he doesn’t look to happy. Wow! He’s a big one.”
Obviously annoyed, the farmer, who was still talking about his crop, took his hand and brushed his cap, hoping to satisfy my obsession with this ugly creature.
“Nope. Still there,” I said, as the spider began an eight-legged marathon across the guy’s head. No kidding. My heart was literally pounding, as I watched the spider crawl around the guy’s ear and over the top of his head. There was no way I was going to get close to that dang thing, so with emphasis, I said, “Nope. You missed him. Try again.” (The next thing I’m going to tell you could be included in an upcoming Halloween movie. If you can, visualize the following, and you’ll be able to hear the most blood-curdling scream I was never able to utter.)
Mostly to satisfy my persistent nagging, the guy once again brushed his hand across his cap to remove the spider. When he did so, that ugly, hairy creature made a bee-line for ... you guessed it ... me! In one quick motion, that spider leaped from the guy’s cap directly onto my chest ... and by “chest,” I mean he jumped inside my shirt, inside (we’re adults here, aren’t we) my bra ... and decided to tap dance across my chest.
Did I mention how much I detest spiders?
Because we are a family newspaper, I’m not going to tell you how this story ended up ... let’s just say that poor, old farmer will never forget the day the editor of the newspaper “revealed” just how frightened she is of spiders ...
May your Halloween stories be considerably less scary than mine ...
