I’m a big fan of nature. I enjoy walking through the grass with my dogs, or riding little Buddy through the woods. Also I like to look through the window at a cloudless blue sky, pretty as a Microsoft screensaver. In other words, I like nature just fine, as long as it stays outside.
But lately at my house, nature has been overstepping her bounds.
It began at the first dip in the temperature, and to me, it’s no coincidence that it happened at football season. For some reason, around this time of year, every time I open my front door, spiders try to run inside my house. I’m not kidding. It’s as if the spiders have been huddling out front, and the sound of the doorknob is their hut-hut-hut signal. I open the door and, instantly, spiders charge over the threshold at me, in a flying spider wedge formation. I’m not talking only one or two spiders; I’m talking about six or seven spiders, and they’re huge, like spider linebackers in a Super Bowl team of arachnids.
I have no defense.
I can’t bring myself to kill them, because I couldn’t take the guilt. I learned somewhere along the line that spiders are good for us and blah blah blah. Even if I were less of a goody-goody, it would be impossible to kill them all. It would be like playing whack-a-mole, and four or five of them would run through my legs, which they consider mere goal posts to scoring a spider touchdown. Sometimes they have to settle for a spider field goal, which is when they reach the floor vents and disappear inside. By October, my heating ducts will be full of webs, the perfect decoration for their big Halloween party.
Back in the summer, or preseason, when only one or two spiders played for the team, I was able to defend my end of the field by turning a glass tumbler over them, then slipping a magazine underneath the tumbler and taking them back outside, where they belong. Another defense that worked was cursing and stamping my feet, because they seemed to react to hysteria and/or profanity. They would simply turn around, run outside, and regroup for the next play. But my tumbler defense won’t work anymore; I don’t have the coordination, or the glassware.
The current score is Spiders 52, Scottoline 0. They even improved their record from last season and while they claim they made some excellent trades, I smell steroids.
Either way, I know when I’m licked, and my only solution was to stop using my front door. Now I go out the back door all the time, which is completely inconvenient, not to mention embarrassing. I save face only by telling myself that I have outsmarted the spiders, at least until they resort to battering rams of praying mantises.
But it gets worse.
The other day, I came home and in the kitchen was my adorable gray-and-white kitten, Vivi, resting like a baby Sphinx-in front of a long green snake, which lay motionless on the floor. I went into my hysteria-and-profanity routine, but, to my horror, it awakened both kitten and snake. The snake slithered at warp speed over the Karastan and through the kitchen chairs. Vivi took off after the snake, and I took off after Vivi.
There ensued chasing (Vivi) and wriggling (snake) and screaming (me). Somehow I scooped Vivi up and threw her into the bathroom, then I screamed some more while the snake undulated around the kitchen, its green head raised like a suburban cobra.
By the way, no other pets came to my aid. The other kitten scooted off, her black tail a question mark, and my three golden retrievers lolled sleepily on the kitchen floor, though I could tell they were rooting for me, inside. Ruby The Corgi pointed and laughed, which means that I’m cutting her Prozac.
I didn’t know what to do. If I couldn’t bring myself to kill a spider, there was no way I could bring myself to kill a snake. I wouldn’t know how, anyway. Step on it? You can only ask so much of a clog.
I ran to the closet, grabbed a broom, and, screaming the entire time, swept the snake out of the house, through the front door.
The snake was only too glad to slither outside.
The spiders were only too glad to run inside.
Touchdown!