Six legs too many

It’s spider season again. Time to break out my double-wammy industrial-strength pow-wow… ummmmm, concoction.

Spiders??? Oh Bon, surely you can’t be talking about now… it’s June!!!… simply can’t be.  In any case, I’m sure the problem is minutely miniscule…

Ahem. Never mind the Fall season when you see all the Wolf ‘writing’ spiders. Ole Bon’s spiders say the time is now. Every morning I go down two sets of stairs looking like a zombie – left arm filled with my workbag, purse, lunch and sometimes trash, and right arm waving back and forth in front of me like a freaking moron. If I try to throw in a glance around myself to make sure no one’s watching, I lose balance and almost fall down the steps – it must be hilarious to watch. As recently as this morning, I was clotheslined by yet another invisible web on the second floor. I promptly **dropped** everything and completed two full 360’s all while appearing to have a seizure, all done in order to entertain the average viewer. You are welcome.

This takes me back to when I first moved in my current residence. It was May of ’08, and the first thing I noticed was a spider infestation. The couple that resided here for ten years prior to me were elderly, and it didn’t seem to bother them. Enter Bon. Believe me when I say it did bother me. Apparently my predecessors either a) didn’t care about the spiders or b) literally couldn’t see them. I’m shooting for the latter. I mean, these people were in their 90’s…

I was absolutely horrified. Here I was, finally, in my own little condo – perfect in every way except for a spider infestation. The balcony seemed to be the worst, so that’s where I picked to start. I made a trip to the local hardware store and bought a gallon-sized industrial strength pesticide which even came equipped with a strong pump-stream system. Just pull back on the external trigger nozzle until completely loaded, and that baby’ll spray for a full 20 seconds at warp speed.  Once I positioned myself on the stepladder and started spraying through the rafters, I completed the first two walls rather quickly. All the sudden the damn things started coming out by the dozens, spinning their long silk and swinging towards me. I immediately felt like a character out of a Stephen King book, already visualizing myself taking that accidental fall from a ladder over a third story ledge. I’m not talking small spiders – the littlest ones were about the size of my thumbprint, and that doesn’t include legs. These ‘things’ had been allowed to infest the place for so long that they had ‘morphed’ into some sort of amazon gargantuan thing not from this planet. A mega-spider, if you will. I panicked screamed. Ducked left, ducked right, and finally ducked inside – all while cursing myself for spraying more than one wall at a time, in turn pretty much barricading myself out of my home. Finally, after a couple of days of exterminating (one wall at a time from here on out, thank you) the porch was wiped clean of spiders.

Ahhhh… I am victorious!! And so was born the quest for a huge superhero applique for the front of my t-shirt. SB, for SuperBon. Or maybe even SpiderBon.

What I neglected to address in my extermination efforts was the fact that I may well have pushed some most of them indoors. Maybe they existed beforehand, I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that within those couple of days, more and more spiders began making their glorious appearing indoors – and that didn’t work for me. One night, I pulled back the comforter and sheets to get in bed – unveiling two very large black spiders smack-dab* in the middle of my bed. Realizing their newfound exposure, one shoots off to the right and the other to the left (again, like something fresh out of a nightmare). To this very day I maintain those things were mating in my bed. I managed to kill one, but never found the other. As for me, I remained in a light-filled room sitting upright in the fetal position for the rest of the night. Tucking my knees under my chin, I balled my eyes out. And come morning, I was completely unrecognizable by the people closest to me – although by this point it was questionable as to whether I had actually been bit by spiders and might be having a bad allergic reaction that swelled my entire face up.

I can laugh about all of this now. It wasn’t at all long after the ‘bed incident’ that I was completely spider-free… thanks once again to the heroic efforts of SuperBon/SpiderBon.

(But I wouldn’t want to do it all again.)

*Southern Slang definition of the day:  Smack-dab: squarely, and directly.