21 October, 2004
arachnophilia

some months ago, i made a deal with the landlady. in exchange for a month's rent (after she undercut the two grand bid that my former Brit painting partner would normally charge), i offered to paint the house. not a particularly Herculean feat since this abode is best described "bungalow" rather than "estate", there was plenty of dreaded prep work to be done. scraping. sanding. rebuilding rotted windowsills. making pains to avoid breathing asbestos (from the damaged siding). priming. painting. trimwork.
three months work, in between four hurricanes and a week's vacation.
this has not been an bad thing... really. slowly, surely over the past months, i'd become more reclusive with the unbearable deterioration of the bonds of holy matrimony. friends were no longer welcome, so i, too, retreated. for sanity's sake, a Big Project was a necessity... an excellent excuse to repel the incessant trips to stepdaughterland.
in that time, i'd become intimate with every square inch of that structure, more than once.
i was not alone.
in every crack, corner, overhang, recess... spiders of every description, in mass quantities.
when i was much younger, this would have been a problem... fear of eight-legged arachnids "runs" in the family, "running" being the active verb, literally, for most. instead, i've learned to accept them for the purpose that they serve. population control. bug population.
now, this co-operation reaps benefits... especially for my mindset, and how my bones set, as well. see, if i continued to fret over them, working on a ladder at full extension would be an accident awaiting, should i encounter a cluster of eight eyes and legs the span of my hand waaay up there.
actually, after a while, there were things to admire about them.
tenacity, for one... since i'd manage, daily, to whisk away countless webs to get to any particular work area (taking care to not annihilate the lot of them... hey, i believe in karma)... but they'd be back, the next day.
you would have to admire the skill and efficiency of web design, also. sometimes ragged, occasionally baroque, always effective.
and, in truth, they kept their distance from me. live, let live. i think that point got across, somehow, in our nonverbal way.
one afternoon, a cloudless cold-front day that brought skies the colour of cobalt, i was watching the twin ruts of a jet's contrails scrape the heavens overhead, when i thought i was starting to see illusions. other, finer, slivery trails flared in the stark sunlight. no, it was spider d-day, and the paratroops were coming in, en masse. the entire sky was criss-crossed with silk.

(a luta continua)

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