Close Encounters

Sometimes we don't know how fragile our little existence really is. I mean, we can be so dangerously close to death, and not have any awareness of it at the time. But boy, when it actually is realized, it's a shattering sort of feeling that leaves you trembling.

This morning Jonas and I took our basket and a pair of scissors out to the yard to collect some basil. You see, the basil plants were planted right alongside the tomatoes, and they're really taking over the space and choking the tomatoes. So I figured we'd pretty much chop them back to nothing and make pesto out of it. Pesto is one of those great things that freezes well and is great with lots of different things- chicken, pasta, bread... you get the picture.

So, out we go, and we spend a good twenty minutes or so playing around in the basil. I would trim it and toss it on the ground and Jonas would collect it and stack it all neatly in the basket.

With that done, we set the basket on the porch and went to play in the hose while watering the squash and zucchini.

I love watching him play in the water- the way he laughs and giggles when the spray lands on his face. I love that full-belly laugh when he turns the hose on me without warning. Heck, I just love the kid!

So, thoroughly drenched, we return to the porch, I strip off his soaking wet clothes and shoes, gather him up in my arms, grab the basket of basil and plop it right on his belly and carry the whole bundle inside.

We make a pit stop in the kitchen to drop off the basil, and then we go get changed.

After getting into dry clothes and getting J a drink, I set to work cleaning and de-stemming the basil. Basically this means taking the long stems from the basket, stripping the leaves off into one side of the sink that's full of cold water, and tossing the stems and bruised leaves in the other side.

So I'm merrily leaf stripping and Jonas is playing with his fire truck at my feet when I look over into the stem side of the sink and OH MY FREAKING GOD! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT CRAWLING AROUND IN THERE! A big, mean, angry black widow spider. *EEEEEKKK*

While my brother my tell you otherwise, I'm not really all that squeamish about bugs. It comes with living down here in the great swamp state where if it has less than six legs it's probably not native. But to have something that has venom 15 times more deadly than a rattlesnake's sitting there in my kitchen sink is a little creepy.

And in one instant rush my mind starts replaying the whole morning- how J had his hands in the plants with me, how he collected the basil from the ground, how he carried the basket all around the yard, how I had set it on his bare naked little belly while I carried him inside. The realization that, at any moment in there, he could have been fatally bitten was just overwhelming.

I scooped J up as if that spider could somehow jump from the sink all the way across the kitchen and attack him! I deposited him safely in his bedroom asking him to me a good book to read and then began devising my plan of attack.

Of course there's no bug spray in this house- we used it all killing the wasps before the painter came to do the house.

So donning elbow-length rubber gloves and armed with a bottle of hairspray and a piece of 1x2 that we use to secure the sliding glass doors, I set to work killing our unwanted and very scary intruder.

BTW, black-widows are not very susceptible to death by White Rain-ing. Really it did nothing more than piss her off. But it did bring her to the surface of the pile of stems so that I could deliver the fatal blow with my stick, the whole time cringing and acting very much like a girl.

Once I was sure she was dead, which meant pulverizing her body to an unrecognizable pulp in the drain, I cleaned out the sink completely, took the trash immediately outside just in case she wasn't really dead, and finally, sat down on the floor and caught my breath.

Upon further inspection it appears that the entire exterior of my house is currently crawling with black widows. I will be contacting an exterminator in the morning, but meanwhile, I don't think I'll be sleeping a wink.

I've always hated living in Florida, but now I might actually have some decent leverage with which to convince Wil that moving is a good idea. Are there black widows in Portland, Amanda?