Bugs on My Feet, Feet on My Lips

I seem to have this relationship with bugs. Anything creepy-crawly and disgusting, really. Couldn't tell you why. Maybe it is just the fabulously kind and accepting Cinderella-esque aura I exude, you know, where I sit in the ashes and attract small forest creatures and they come and sing to me and stuff. 

 . . . or appear under my toes in gargantuan and completely disturbing proportions, where I might step upon them and experience their arachnid innards between my toes.

. . . or appear somewhere on my facial-person where I can get up close and personal with their fuzzy arthropod-ness.

Definitely a Disney curse.

Definitely not okay.

My most memorable Near-Bug-Guts-Experience came when I was about 19 years old and had just returned from a date. I lived in the basement of my mom's house while attending college, in a room that happened to be right below hers. It was 1 a.m., on the morning in question, and I was dead tired. I had crept, sock-footed, through the family room with the lights off so as not to wake anyone. And then I placed one heel into my room, getting ready to move in and collapse onto the bed.

All of a sudden this overwhelming feeling to NOT PUT THE REST OF MY FOOT DOWN flooded me. Hmm. Odd. So, with my heel to the ground and my toes waving around in the air, I reached around the doorjamb and flipped on the light.

There, right beneath where the ball of my foot would kiss the carpet was the hugest, furriest leggiest brown spider I have ever seen. Dude was the size of a beagle–I'm so not kidding–and was staring balefully at me as if to say "Go ahead. Make my day."

I froze, sucked up all the oxygen in the room, then zoomed upstairs and grabbed the vacuum. Ugly mugly bugly was not going to spend the night in MY hotel. (I wasn't thinking rationally. Vacuuming this ginormoid up was just going to make it mad. It would very likely eat through the vacuum bag, stomp downstairs, and chew my toes off. But as I said, rationality is not my strong-suit at one in the morning.)

I returned to my bedroom, Electrolux-weapon-of-choice dragging along beside me, running shoes strapped to my feet–for obvious reasons–and a can of bug spray hooked to my belt. Harrison Ford had nothing on me, baby. Then I set to work.

Quietude was the mode of the moment, as my mom was sleeping upstairs and my brother in the next room. So I carefully peeked through the doorway to find that Mr. Arachnid had made himself cozy in the far corner of my room, next to a bookshelf filled with yearbooks, diaries, sketchbooks, and writing pads scrawled with the stories that were going to make me famous. *gasp*. Dastardly dude was holding my memorabilia hostage. So very below the belt. That was IT. He was going down.

So I plugged in the canister vacuum, let my finger hover over the switch as I cast a prayer upward that the carnage would end quickly and no one in my house would wake up, and then I turned my little swirling-vortex-of-arachnid-death on.

 Annnnd spent the next 30 minutes shrieking and running around my room like a girl.

Turned out the spider was of the jumping variety. And every time I got close to it with the vacuum hose it would leap outward–that is to say, toward me–and land a full 2 feet away from where I held the trembling Electrlux nozzle at arm's length. Nearly onto my feet. Which meant I had to fling myself backward and scream in order to save myself.

By the time I was able to catch the big dude unawares enough that he finally folded disgustingly up the tube, everyone was banging on walls and floors and asking me what the heck was going on in there and why did I need a vacuum at 1:30 in the morning, and good grief! Couldn't I just shut up and go to sleep already?

Oh yeah. I went to sleep. After I took the vacuum–with the spider of evil-ness incarcerated in its guts plotting its escape–up to the coat closet. I stuck the vacuum tube straight down on the floor so the bug couldn't get out if it tried, and piled everyone's coats on top of it. Then I tried to forget about it. (Might've been easier just to store the vacuum outside for a few days, but there was that whole middle-of-the-night-irrationality-thing going on.)

Took a while to recover from that. Just like it had taken a while to recover from The Moth Incident.

Oh yes, The Moth Incident. This was awesome. It was during this experience that I discovered moths have multiple, separate, and distinct little feet. It isn't a long story.  Suffice it to say that when you are the only little person for miles reading a book by flashlight in the wilderness, moths will find you. And when they do, they will seek the closest landing site to the light as possible. And if you are trying to hold the flashlight close to the book so you won't wake up your other Girl's Camp tent-mates, that closest landing site will very likely be your lips. At which time you will discover that not only do moths have feet, and not only do they have several of them, but those feet are fuzzy. And human lips are very sensitive to fuzzy moth feet and are able to distinguish every. single. one.

And then you will realize that to scream would only give the moth entrance into your tongue and tooth-filled landing bay, and to smack it away would likely smoosh its guts into your mouth. So all you can do is vibrate your lips frantically and hope the little creature gets the hint and leaves.

Which it does, finally. Just in time for breakfast.

I have several more experiences like this in my memory. And I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is that old idea that we draw the things we fear to us. If that is the case, I need to make friends with little fuzzy beasties, because I'm quite sick of dealing with them. Perhaps what I need to develop instead is a hearty fear of spas and resorts. Where I'm pretty sure they spray for pests.

Yes. That is what I believe I shall do. Massages with lemon oil scare the living daylights out of me. So do bowls of fine chocolates and mineral water with strips of cucumber languishing in them. And so, epically, do great big spider-free zones.

Ack! Ack! Get them AWAY!

(I'll let you know how this goes.)