Yesterday morning, upon entering my bathroom, I encountered a hastily scribbled note laying on top of a crumpled pair of pants on the floor. It read: "Warning! Contents within pants contains evil spider."
I still haven't asked for the real story, but I can imagine my teenage daughter picking up a pair of pants off the floor of her basement bedroom to put them on, only to be scared to death by a giant spider crawling up her leg. I can imagine her jumping up and down taking the pants off and leaving them in a pile on the floor where they fell. Then, because she is a thoughtful and caring child, leaving me a note before she goes to school, to spare me the same heart attack. I laugh and cringe at this image. And it spurs a few trains of thought...
Tip: very scary spiders who run fast can be slowed by sticky hairspray. Then you can drop a heavy phone book on them.
My favorite spider encounter stories:
Once, before putting my glasses or contacts on in the morning, I sat on the toilet and felt something brush against my bare thigh. I jumped up, ran out of the bathroom to get my glasses, looked at where I'd been and saw a gigantic black spider on the toilet seat. The thought that it had just crawled across me skin gave me the shivers.
Multiple times I've walked through a spider web outside and had to violently shake myself off, and for several minutes afterward had to brush off my arms and shake my hair, just in case the spider was still on me.
And then of course there are the times when I wake up in the morning and find a 3-inch red bump on my leg and realize I've spent the night in bed with a spider. Which brings me back to the topic of warnings. I might like to see these posted in various places around my house.
warning: contents within bed contains evil spider.
warning: contents within teenage boy's room contains week old glass of milk and dirty underwear
warning: contents within refrigerator contains month old moldy cheese and fuzzy strawberries
warning: contents within car contains several Mcdonald's bags, some still containing old french fries. The good news: french fries don't go moldy. The bad news: we eat them.
warning: contents within washing machine contains load of levis washed three days ago. open at your own risk.
warning: contents within closet contains stack of t-shirts so high that it will probably fall on you if you touch it.
warning: I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of these situations in my own house.
2 comments:
ew ew ew ew eeew.
sad that i relate to so many of your warnings. especially things like fuzzy strawberries and jeans in the washer from three days ago.
if fries don't go moldy, does that mean there is no semblance of natural food to them? food goes bad. fries do not. what ARE they made of?
My worst spider encounter was when I was a beehive at rough camp. All of us little girls were exiled in our tent, because the big girls didn't want to play with us. We were all lying around on our sleeping bags eating candy and talking.
Someone said something funny, and I began to laugh out loud. As I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling of the tent and laughin, I saw a spider directly over my face.
In the very instant that I opened my mouth wide to laugh and simultaneously saw and registered the presence of the spider, the spider quickly dropped and landed, as though perfectly aimed, in the back of my throat.
I choked on it and swallowed. I'm not sure if this next part is true or was just my imagination (like the phantom spider you have to continuously shake off over and over, just in case) but I remember feeling it trying to crawl back up my throat. I swallowed over and over, trying to force it down into my stomach where the acid would kill it. Swallowing a spider is bad enough, but I simply could not bear it if it came crawling back out. Ew. Ew.
True story.
Post a Comment