Surviving Sugarhouse

Status update: I'm currently doing respite care for one of my clients. Meaning I'm spending a great deal of time in her house, an older house with charming vegetation. Beautiful tulips, a large pink blushing, blossoming hanging tree, blackberry bushes and more. Most of the windows lack screens and that alarms me.

Coming from Lamar, CO, capitol of bugs, I wince at the thought of anything with six or more legs. Even four can be too many. Screen doors, screen windows, screening phone calls...all important as they keep the unwanted away. Luckily Salt Lake lacks the bug population of Lamar, but it doesn't lack in the creepy crawlers.

Spiders. Eeek. I have an irrational fear of them that sprouts from an unfortunate watching of Arachnophobia. My dad called it family bonding, I called it torture. As it turned out I was right, being plagued with nightmares for years.

Those nightmares came crashing into the foreground tonight when I walked up the narrow steep stairs to the attic bedroom I'm sleeping in. Thank you Flowers In the Attic for my irrational fear of attics. So there I am facing fear of attic when I flip on the light to face fear of large black spider speeding towards my toe. I suppose I'm thankful that this was a freeze fear and I was unable to scream. I did mutter some strange guttural sounds in gasps.

I grabbed the first shoe I could find (I only feel right about killing spiders with shoes. They offer enough distance and usually you can't see the guts afterward.). Then I jumped on the chair close to the spider, which by now had a not-so-irrational fear of me, and talked myself into throwing the shoe with a skilled and marked aim. Success! The little sucker curled up into a dead spider position.

Failure! Something soft a furry slid onto my foot at the exact time and I screamed to tears. Up in the attic, locked away, where my mother would never see me again.

I looked down to see a pillow grazing my foot and my dead eight-legged friend still curled up in despair. He deserved a solid beating. I picked up the shoe again.

What happened next may have been savage, but it was necessary.