A tale of crawlies

There's a rather small spider that has made it's residence next to the front door of our house. It just kind of sits (or stands, or hangs, or whatever it does) on the wall. Every day I'd see it in a different place in that exact same area. And when I approach to put my shoes on, since that is where our shoes are all congregated, it just remains completely still as if it could blend in with its surroundings.

But I can still see it. It's there, just hanging out. For at least two weeks, it hasn't gone anywhere else but that one area of wall right next to the doorway.

Typically, when I see a spider, it's usually crawling upwards on a wall somewhere right next to my desk in the basement room. And my first reaction is, as always, to utterly exterminate the cretin without hesitation. Grab the bug spray, spray away, then when it plummets a few feet to the carpet where it may or may not be wriggling in the pain of being poisoned by man-made legal murder of animals, I take a rather large sheet of paper towel, crumple it up and then flush it down the toilet.

I'm a scaredy cat when it comes to creep crawlies, even if I don't show it. From experience, when I see them, my reaction isn't slow, but rather my reactions are always begun with a simple, "Remain calm, act tough, if you freak out, you'll just lose sight of it."

Not too long ago, maybe sometime last year, I got to work, probably walked right through a spider web and contracted the resident living there. My co-worker saw it, freaked out, and excitedly pointed out that there was a spider crawling on my shoulder.

"Okay," I told her.

"Hang on, I'll get it off," she tells me. She so grabs some papers and swats at me. Lo and behold, she swats in the wrong direction and instead of falling to the ground it goes down my shirt. And she screams as much, "It went down you shirt!"

"Okay," I say to her. And without jumping or screaming, I calmly reach into my shirt, turn my collar out to find the darn thing and gently swat it away from me and onto the ground. Now I don't quite remember what happened to it next. It could have crawled away, I could have squashed it, or it could have just disappeared behind the table.

But that was when I realized that I could be quite calm when dealing with a spider crawling down my shirt and I was rather impressed with myself. And from that day on, whenever I see spiders, I don't get jumpy like I used to back in high school, but I remain calm and decide the best way to extinguish it. It's just easier so that you don't lose sight of it when you freak out.

But back to the spider on the wall next to my front door.

Yea, it's still there. I don't know why it's still there. I'm surprised that no one else in the house has seen it yet. I've caught the smell of bug spray every so often and wondered if my mother had killed it. But this morning when I stepped downstairs and walked through our tiny receiving area, I noticed that the little creature was still there, this time on the ceiling.

Why haven't I killed it? one may ask. Well, I don't really know. Lack of desire to kill it, probably. I didn't want to deal with it at first, mostly because I'd been in a hurry to get to work the first time I saw it. But afterwards, when it never moved from its spot, I just didn't have the motivation to off it when it's just sitting there and, well, hanging out.

Or maybe I'm just plain too lazy to off it and feel like it hasn't done anything to me, so why bother it.

Sooner or later, it'll probably get found my someone in my household. I don't know why it hasn't yet.

But for now, I just let it hang and actually find myself looking for it whenever I walk by to see if it's still there. And each and every time, it usually is, even if it's in a different spot.