I stood at the bathroom sink this morning, watching it crawl up the wall.  It was HUGE, at least the size of my pinkie nail with those eight creepy legs making their  way towards the ceiling.  Do I kill it or let it crawl?  I hate killing spiders almost as much as the spiders themselves.  No, if I let it crawl it could eventually make it over to the shower and come down on my head.  Spiders like to do that, you know.  No, I needed to kill it, but how?  I could just use a tissue, but then there’s just the tissue between me and certain death.  I needed a shoe.  But not just any shoe.  A shoe with as flat a sole as possible so that he couldn’t escape into one of the crevices and scare me when I looked at the bottom of the shoe.  So, I found the shoe, found just the right spot to hit it with and just for good measure, I smeared the shoe on the wall.  What remained was a splotch of brown pieces that now no longer looked like a spider, so I could wipe it up and flush it.  Not put it in the trash can because it could regenerate or something.

This one tiny spider – and I admit it was tiny – completely threw me off of my routine, as spiders can do.  When the boys were living at home, all I had to do was yell spider and somebody came running, sometimes working in tandem, one killing the spider, one disposing of the dead carcass.  Now that they’re grown and mostly gone and I am at home alone sometimes, my biggest fear is coming upon a spider too large to deal with.  I’m not sure where the fear initially came from, but I can remember my mother being so afraid of spiders and snakes (sounds like Jim Stafford for all you oldies out there) that all she had to do was come upon a picture unexpectedly and she would screech out loud.  As we got older, my brother and I were tempted to put a picture out on occasion to scare her on purpose, but I think we were afraid to die, so we didn’t.  Anyway, enough of that screeching and I think I developed the same phobia, although I don’t usually screech at pictures, just the real thing.

I have been trapped by spiders two times I can remember.  Once in the kitchen when there was a wolf spider between me and the door, I yelled “spider!!!” and I was up on the counter so fast I surprised myself.  The guys just walked in that time and laughed at me before they finally got the spider.  I was not amused.  Probably the worst time was when we were living in an upper floor apartment and there was only one door and I was supposed to go pick Doug up from school after rehearsal or something.  The problem was there was this huge wolf spider between me and the door and there were no boys yet to call.  Sure, we had a sliding door to the patio, but I wasn’t going to rappel down the outside wall of the building, so I had to get rid of the spider somehow without actually touching it.

Perhaps throwing shoes at it would be the answer.  If my aim was just right, maybe I could squish it from afar, but no such luck.  After going through every pair of shoes we owned and marking up both sides of the entry hall, I began to panic.  These were the days before cell phones and I had no way to contact Doug to let him know what was going on.  Maybe if I had some bug spray I could spray it to death.  So I found some ant spray and emptied the can on it.  It was still moving.  Next I tried every spray cleaner I owned and it was still twitching.  Twitching means that, just like any good horror movie, it could come back to life and jump on me, so it had to be all curled up and still before I would know it was dead.  What finally worked?  Well I probably traumatized the thing with the shoes first, but seems hair spray freezes the spider completely stiff, just like my hair.  After waiting a while longer, I plastered myself against the opposite wall from the spider, stepping over a mountain of shoes and finally left to get Doug.  He still remembers walking in to all those shoes laying all around that stiff, crumpled spider.

On occasion, spiders get into my room at school and my custodian will be informed immediately if I don’t have any kids in the room so that he can get rid of it.  However, if I have a class, much like I did with my boys, I don’t yell “spider” (because that’s not cool), I merely state, in a very calm voice “I need someone who doesn’t mind getting this spider for me” and invariably several students will come forward while I stand back “supervising”.  While I might be a little more calm when I come upon a spider these days, there are two things I will always keep on hand.  Hairspray and plenty of shoes.