My
wife Jennifer and I have been married for 12 years now. I am sure if you
were to ask her about our marriage, she would confidently refer to it as
“Twelve years of wedded bliss.” In this time, we have had four children,
each one very different from the one before. And, we have developed an
understanding of one another that is both wonderful and humorous at the same
time. I often refer to her as “The LW”, which depending on how things are
going in our household, can mean “The Lovely Wife” or “The Little Woman”.
The former usually gets a smile. The latter always gets an eye roll and
general bad thoughts aimed like spears in my general direction. Case in
point…
Jennifer
has an often unhealthy fear of smaller creatures. She is not afraid of
snakes, frogs, reptiles or things with scales. She does not care for
dogs, but she is not afraid of them. I have personally witnessed her
stick her hands in a child's diaper to retrieve things that should not be
there. But, creatures in the insect world throw her off her game.
She cannot handle them. The worst is roaches. I often refer to them
palmetto bugs, which helps a little simply because I did not bring up the term
roach. But, at the end of the day, she knows I am talking about roaches,
and her heart starts palpitating.
In
this particular incident, the offending insect was not a roach, but a spider,
and it occurred in a moving vehicle, on the highway, in Atlanta. The
interstate in Atlanta is not a safe place without insects, much less if you
have one that is going for your jugular. But, when you have a deadly
creature that is trying to gouge out your eyes, one wrong move and you can shut
down the entire city if you are not careful.
On
my family’s way home from school, my eldest son innocently asked the LW if she
could open the sunroof. It is a nice, warm fall day, so why not,
right? Wrong. What they did not know was there was a spider that
lived in the crevices of the sunroof that was waiting for just such an
opportunity to present itself so it could pounce on its unsuspecting quarry and
eat the whole brood, one at a time.
Poor
spider. He had no idea what he had gotten himself into. When the LW
opened the sunroof, the spider lowered itself to get a new lay of the
land. Unfortunately, his new vantage point was on my wife’s shirt.
She is driving up the highway at a good clip and starts to literally, freak
out. She begins driving erratically, and not-so-smoothly veers over onto
the shoulder-tires squealing, brakes smoking- all the time pulling at her shirt
and screaming to our eldest child at the top of her lungs, “Strib!
Strib! Get it! Where did it go? Where did it go? It’s
going to kill me! Get it! Get it!” Josie, number three in
line and all the way in the back starts crying because her mama has clearly
lost all sense of reality. Demi, number two and right next to Josie,
calmly starts asking why the LW’s face is turning red. Hint: it wasn't
because of toxins from the deadly spider being injected in her face. It
was because she had lost control of herself. Win, number 4, was sound
asleep in his car seat, completely oblivious to the goings on.
Strib,
throwing caution to the wind, unbuckles himself, grabs a flipflop (which for
some reason was within easy reach) and just starts swatting. He knocked
the critter off the LW’s shirt, onto her leg, and then onto the
floorboard. By that point, it was probably dead as it had pulled its legs
in and was no longer moving. And, I think spiders are a fragile
bug. But, in our house we treat spiders like a wounded bear. You
keep shooting until you are almost out of ammunition and you know for sure that
it is dead, then cautiously poke it with the loaded gun just in case it decides
to move again.
Well,
needless to say, the spider, or what could still be found of it, was
dead. In fairness to my wife, it was large. I don’t know if it was
a wolf spider or anything hairy with lots of eyes, but it was big.
Fortunately, my son was there to protect the lady folks. Without him, I
am sure they would still be parked on the side of the road, passed out from
screaming and crying, and the spider would have moved on to greener
pastures.
