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At our country house, we shower with a spider. Factor in a recent visit by a substantial copperhead, and it’s plain that the recent heavy rains have done more than just washed our gravel road down to the highway – the downpours have engaged critters’ mobility instincts, apparently.
Jim Stafford sang “Spiders and Snakes,” a song that was a hit back in early 1974 when such a tune could be a hit on the radio. (He now warbles the song regularly at Branson, along with “Wildwood Weed,” a novelty ode that definitely would not be heard on today’s public airways.)
The former the song I sometimes sing in the shower while keeping an eye on the spindly spider who has lived just above the Bath and Body Works “Peony Smooth Body Wash” container. That spider could live there forever since I will never use anything on my body with the word “peony” in it. Being a male, I don’t need fancy washing materials in the shower: I use Dove bar soap (no washrag) and Head and Shoulders shampoo. Since Stafford’s heyday, those are the only two things I’ve ever needed in a shower. The spider doesn’t seem to mind my warbling, I guess. It’s not too crazy about my actual shampooing; I’m from the school of scrub-your-scalp-brutally and that can send foam out the door and around the corner into the hallway (which is quite a feat, really). The shower starts looking like a foamy car wash when the cranial assault commences. The spider just hunches down behind the peony scrub container.
Just as with a drought, big rains can send critters moving, too. Spiders clearly like our house; maybe we’re in the Spider AAA Diamond Ratings book as being spider-friendly. After all, I seldom kill spiders. The bride will slap a cup atop them and wait for me to scoop up the arachnids and deposit them back outside. I come home sometimes and the house is dotted with plastic cups covering captured spiders. (Now, I know it sounds like our house is some kind of insect/snake-infested abode, but it’s really not. The place is 35 years old and, clearly, there are a few slits where critters enter, but we just figure that’s part of country living.) I always wonder what that long-legged shower spider eats. Maybe we scrub off teeny critters, like you see in super microscopes, tiny monsters that apparently live in your bed and sinuses. The bride will tolerate showering with a friendly neighborhood spider, but snakes are something else. Apparently we’re also in the snake version of the AAA Diamond Ratings. Maybe it mentions that our dishwasher is some kind of reptilian Club Med. This most recent serpent visit came around dusk in one of the few October days that it didn’t rain. I was taking out the trash barefoot and there, reveling in the warmth the driveway still held, was a pretty big copperhead. As a general rule, I don’t kill things. I even paused over this poisonous snake that was trapped like a rat en route, most likely, to our groovy, highly-rated dishwasher. It was thick bodied for a copperhead even if it had the usual dinky triangular head. I called the bride to come look and when she saw what it was, she slammed the door shut. (While not too leery of spiders [since cups fit so easily over them], the bride is very prejudiced against snakes which require bigger cups than we currently own.) I said, “Isn’t it lovely? I kinda hate to kill one of God’s creatures.” “Kill it,” she said quickly through the door. “He’s probably beneficial,” I noted. “We don’t have any mice or rats.” “Kill. It. Dead. Now.” The copperhead twirled about on itself, plotting some sort of last ditch escape, surely. Now, the rule at our house is to kill scorpions, questionable spiders, and copperheads/rattlesnakes/water moccasins/coral snakes (I’ve never seen the latter.) So this visitor was on The List. Still, I hesitated until the bride said the magic word – “Grandkids” – that sent me fetching the current popular snake-killing weapon. For me, that used to be a hoe, but I broke it last week, using it as an edger. That moved a pointy shovel to the top of the death-dealing rotation. (I’ve slayed Listed snakes with a hadite block, hoes, and tire wheels. I don’t have a gun...well, I have a pellet pistol I got last Christmas; what better way to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace than with a handgun? But the thing only fires one shot at a time and is more valuable to just throw at any kind of troublemaker.) Well, the shovel performed admirably, but it surely cost us a diamond in the Snake AAA Diamond Ratings. I bet we’ve still got five diamonds with the spiders, however. Mark K. Campbell is the Azle News sports editor. |
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