Idea Number 18: The Irony of the Name

The Irony of the Name of This Blog

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of spiders.   To this day, I check my bed every night before getting in; thankfully, there aren’t spiders in my bed!  I kinda freak out when I see one in my house, and yell for Ole Boy to kill it, while I keep an eye on the intruder.    If he’s not there, I’ve got a pretty good aim with a phone book.  I can toss one half-way across the room to land on top of a spider.

Once, several years ago before I married Ole Boy, my ten year old daughter and I had a little apartment that was on a concrete slab, near a pasture, and spiders were plentiful in the summertime.   I always kept a can of Raid handy, and sprayed the apartment every six weeks or so.    One morning after I sprayed, my daughter and I left for the day, (ballgames and cookouts and what-not), and we didn’t get home until around 11:30 p.m.   When I walked in, I saw a very lethargic (but large) black spider near my couch.   Knowing that it was half dead, I felt brave enough to finish killing it.   But as I tried to swat it, it moved under the couch.    When I moved the couch to get to it, there was a movement under the couch akin to a small…elephant (in my mind, anyway)… waddling up under the couch when I moved it.  

I quickly took care of the half-dead black spider and turned my very frightened attention to the one under the couch.   I slid the couch out a little more from the wall, and again the thing waddled along with the move.    Not having Ole Boy there, I called my mom, who lived about a mile away, and asked her to come help me kill it (translated “come kill it for me!”).    Considering that it was around midnight by this time, my mom said something to the effect of killing me if I called her back that night about a spider…

So, there we were…me teaching my daughter how to be as afraid of spiders as my mom taught me to be…at midnight, and no one to do the deed but me.

Daughter said, “Maybe it’s a frog!”   It was about that size, and we’d had both a frog and a lizard in there at other times.   At the thought of a frog, I got really brave, and whipped that couch clear across the living room.   And there…the offender…a curled up oak leaf that had blown in and under my couch.

My daughter is now grown and has Angels of her own, and she has discussions with them when she freaks out about a spider, hoping that they will not grow up to be as afraid as I am (and she is, if she would admit it).    I’m thinking she has some pretty funny spider stories of her own….