Bad Luck Comes In Eights

So I'm walking down Mt. Vernon Street in Beacon Hill yesterday with my Lady. We're on our way to Vanille to get ourselves a latte (well, she's getting a latte, I don't even know for sure what a latte is), sit at one of the outside tables , and people-watch the tourists (they are legion, this time of year). We're about halfway from her house to the cafe when I look up -- and there, between the street sign and the pole, is this enormous black-and-yellow spider, sitting quietly in the center of a perfectly spun web.

I tried to look on line and find a picture of it for you, but I couldn't. Or maybe I could, but I got the heebie-jeebies looking at all the pictures of all the wrong kinds of spiders. And, while I'm heeby-jeebing, did you know that the brown recluse spider -- this famous, only-kind-of-poisonous-spider-that-actually-lives-in-Massachusetts and, it bears repeating, is called brown recluse -- is actually yellow and black? I've been keeping my eyes out all these years for the wrong thing all together. Not that I wouldn't have killed the brown ones anyway, but still. It just goes to show the mentality of the kind of people who study these kinds of things. Anyhoo...

So of course I interrupted my Lady in mid-word, pointed, and exclaimed "Oh my god, look at that spider!" And raised my book to squash it flat.

"Oooohhh..." she sighed. "Look at her..."

Oh crap, I forgot. My Lady is all love the earth and women power. Well, I'll be over here...

We stood around "admiring" her for a minute (a very, very looonggg) minute, and then finally we continued on our way. My poor Lady couldn't remember what she'd been saying when I interrupted, but she'd been reminded of a story.

"In our cottage that we used to rent in Lymington," England, where she and her late husband spent every summer for something like fifteen years, "there was an enormous spider one time at around two in the morning. I swear to you, it was this big," and she made a doughnut of her thumbs and forefingers.

"Urp," I said.

"You should have seen Fred and me. All we could find to catch it in was a saucepan and its cover. So we were chasing it around, clanging the pot and lid together fruitlessly for a good half-hour before we caught the thing -- at two in the morning!" She laughed and wiped a happy tear.

"Oh, our neighbors must have thought that we were nuts," she said, when she was ready to go on.

"We finally caught her, though, and carried her outside. I wonder what the neighbors thought of that!" She smiled, sighed, and looked straight at me.

"We never killed them, you see" she concluded (pointedly?), "because, of course, it's bad luck. "

Oh.

So that explains it.

When we first moved in here, you see, the house was blanketed with what I came to think of as the "golden ceiling spider." With my trusty wad of toilet paper, and from my movable perch on a trusty kitchen chair, I must have killed twenty or thirty of them a day for a least a month. Now, instead of coming in multitudes, they're rolling together by the dozen and stationing each gargantua at strategic interludes -- that, I've decided, is why they disappear so completely when I swat them. Yet swat I do. Swat, squish, step, flush -- ta, ta, Aragog.

And from the day that we moved in here we've had nothing but rotten luck.

Well.

Then.

Ahem.

It looks like my options are: let the spiders live and (hopefully) thrive right along with them; or continue killing them and die slowly myself.

Of course, we could always just move.


It has come to my attention that the link above -- and the sentences above -- regarding the brown recluse spider, may be slightly less than accurate. I didn't look too closely and I thought, because the page was titled "brown recluse something," and because the picture of the spider on the page was labelled "brown recluse something," then that meant it was a page about, and picture of, a brown recluse spider. I was wrong. It is apparently a page about spiders in general, named after the brown recluse, by folks who (excuse me, I just threw up in my mouth a little) love it. For the record, and according to this website, the brown recluse is actually yellow. Glad we cleared that up.

Now that I look at it, the brown recluse looks an awful lot like the golden ceiling spider...

Seriously, we have to move.