Sometimes it's just not Debbie Reynolds

As has been mentioned many times, my brother and I were both Discovery Channel kids. We spent our entire childhood catching frogs and toads and lizards and things. I have noticed a couple of toads that appear every now and then onto the walkway right outside my front door. I assume they live in the flowerbed (or, thanks to the drought, the flower deathbed). Sometimes if I flip on the front light and peek out the front door very quickly, I can see them before they hop away into the darkness. They make me happy -- I don't want to catch them (anymore); I just like knowing that they're there. And, no, I haven't done something ridiculous and girly like naming them...

So, anyway, tonight before going to bed, I went out to look for Fred and Ethel (I mean, the toads), and what do I see? Not Fred. Not Ethel. I see... my mortal enemy. My nemesis. My, "No, not that! Anything but that! I'll talk! I'll talk!" That darn eight-legged consigliere of the devil himself stupid sitting right outside my stupid front door.

My brother, the braver of us two, would have said "It's just a stupid little wolf spider." True that. It definitely wasn't the biggest wolf spider I've ever seen. (I still see that one in my sleep.) But it was big enough. (I have a firm belief that any spider bigger than a silver dollar should be restricted to the jungle. Or possibly Australia.) And it was looking. At. My. House.

Most people would say, "Just leave him alone; let him eat the bugs." However, most people do not have my instinctive reaction to spiders of climbing on top of the nearest piece of furniture (or nearest person) and screaming for help. Ergo, "leaving him alone" is not really an option for me if I ever want to sleep, nap, blink, or generally have a regular heartbeat within these walls in the near future. I do have a rule that as long as spiders stay in their territory (I.e., "outside"), that's fair. But when they invade my territory (I.e., "inside"), then we're gonna' have a fight. This one was close enough.

I closed the door, put on my tennis shoes, pulled my hair back, and armed myself appropriately. Weapons of choice: bug spray in one hand; Lysol in the other. [Nota Bene: The story of "How to Use Lysol As a Defense Against Spiders" may be retold in a follow-up post.] I opened the door gently. He was still there. I carefully stepped waaaaaay over him, pulled the door shut behind me, pivoted on tiptoe, and assumed a "graffiti warrior" yoga pose, facing the enemy.

I hit him with the bug spray, careful not to spray so close as to knock him towards the door. He didn't flinch. I hit him with the Lysol. Some ants scattered from underneath him. He barely twitched. I thought, "Is he dead already? Did the ants already get to him, and he just hasn't curled up or something?"

Spiders don't have normal lungs like most animals do: they have "book lungs". They work more like gills than lungs, really. I'm telling you, I watched a lot of Discovery Channel. Plus, as Sun Tsu would say, "Know your enemy..."

Sorry, Discovery nerd tangent. The point is that spiders don't breathe like we do. So I waited a few seconds, trying to calculate the potential absorption rate of chemicals into his system. He didn't do much. I sprayed again, alternating cans. He moved towards the wall, but not too quickly. I sprayed again; and at this point I had sprayed enough that as the human being with normal lungs, I had to take a step back and refresh my own oxygen supply.

Maybe it was the rush of clean oxygen, but it somewhere in this mix I realized that those ants were awfully tiny. And didn't really move like ants. And weren't really shaped like ants. Oh, no, no, no, no, NO...

For the non-Discovery kids out there, I should mention here that wolf spiders often carry their newly hatched young on their backs. He was a she. And she had babies. Many babies. Whiiiiiine...

The conclusion of this story is that "she" is officially dead. Confirmed. And my front stoop is wet with Lysol and bug spray in my attempt to drown any other living book-lunged creature in that area. I felt kind of bad, taking out a mom. I mean, I read Charlotte's Web when I was little; and I cried when Charlotte died and Wilbur the pig had to raise her babies. (Like pigs do in children's stories.) But Charlotte was sort of an idealistic, abstract animal who in her most concrete form lived in two dimensions and sang pretty songs in Debbie Reynolds's voice. That was not who was sitting on my front doorstep tonight.

As I've said before, the great thing about phobias is that they don't have to make any sense. I really can't be certain that I got rid of the all of the teeny-tiny baby spiders. Statistically speaking, I'm fairly confident that I didn't. So, I'll probably be sleeping with some lights on tonight. Maybe I should watch the Charlotte's Web cartoon movie for a little positive therapy. I'm pretty sure The Discovery Channel would not be a good idea.