As I was cleaning up the kitchen tonight, a HUGE black and grayish spider ran down the wall and squeezed itself through a tiny crack under the floor molding, and hence, into my dirty basement. As I lack any potion resembling a pesticide, I decided to spray Clorox Clean-Up down the crack. I imagined the spider screaming in agony as it was hit with the bleach. Of course, the arachnid probably easily outran the cleaning solution.
I immediately began Googling spider images for identification purposes. I think my invader was a Wolf Spider–not dangerous, just big and ugly. Although he will bite. Google tells me that Wolf spiders like to colonize dark, dirty basements. O joy.
We live in an 80-year-old house. The first floor is directly over the basement, and the floorboards are worn to the nails. There are many cracks and holes between basement and first floor–paving the way for the creatures who like dark and damp to enter our clean, well-lit living space.
A few days ago, I opened a drawer and discovered a ripped bag of cat treats, large rodent droppings, and lots of toothy marks. An hour later, Rocky, sumo-cat, alerted E-spouse to some weirdness under the kitchen sink. E opened the cabinet under the sink only to discover a LARGE rodent in our kitchen trash can.
“Look,” he said. “It’s a really big mouse.”
“That,” I said. “is NOT a big mouse. It is a fricking smallish RAT!”
E-spouse then tells me to throw the cats outside. He’s going to set the rat loose with the cats watching and have himself an old-fashioned Lions and Christians party in the back yard. Except as soon as the cats see the rat, they run. So, and this is the kicker, E-spouse LETS the rat go. He does not whack the rat. He lets the rat run off into the sunshine, twitching his little whiskers and thinking: “SUCKERS!”
Because, yes, I cleaned all cat treats out of the drawer abutting the kitchen sink that the rodent had violated, but guess what? This morning, something, someone, had returned to the drawer and chewed up several plastic kids’ straws.
Now E-spouse is on the road, and I’ve got spiders and rats living IN MY home with me and my children. My daughter is always the first to get up in the morning. Now that she’s seven, she’s rather civilized really. She comes downstairs, turns on some lights, and goes to get the newspaper so she can read the baseball box scores. She’ll get herself some food and some juice and play with her “super babies” someone else gets up.
But tomorrow, I will be advance guard. I mean, what if she goes to throw away the newspaper wrapper and Mr. Rat leaps out of the trash can? What if Mr. Wolf Spider is waiting next to her juice cup in the drawer next to the hole down which he fled? O, it’s going to be an early morning. See ya at 6:00.
