If I Had to Choose, I Would Pick a Spider

So, I know I've blogged about this topic before. Some of you may remember and think that I ought to give it up already. I, however, never tire of it.

My husband has a strange relationship with bugs. In the great outdoors he handles them and inspects them with our son; the two of them allow bugs to crawl about on their hands, wrists, and sometimes even to the upper extremities of their arms. (I feel that a bug has gone far enough when it traverses any point more than one inch above the wrist; they have a way of getting lost once inside clothing).

Once a bug crosses the outer wall of our home, however, my husband views it in an entirely different light. After spotting one, he jumps about, shrieks, and carries on in a way that would make any little girl proud. (Unless, of course, she is relying on him to kill the leggy invader). It's really a very strange thing.

If he has recently slaughtered a bug, or has witnessed me in the act of doing so, he gasps horrendously and jumps four feet in the air anytime a fleck of dust so much as floats past his pinky toe. The kids have picked up on this, and while Daddy is in the midst of reading about Noah and the flood at bedtime, they'll take turns tickling his leg hair with their little fingers or poking him in the foot with some long and pointy toy just so they can watch him go into convulsions.

My husband and I try and rotate when it comes to killing the yucky buggies that we find in the house. Mostly I kill anything in the basement because my husband somehow manages to convince himself that they can't climb the stairs into our living space. I'm pretty sure that anything that can climb walls and walk on the ceiling can find its way up into the kitchen, so if I spot a spider in the cellar I am going to make a valiant effort to squash it so that it doesn't find me and try to suck my face off while I sleep.

There is one bug in particular, though, that we are both deathly afraid of. The many legged, and very freaky, house centipede. The other day I watched helplessly as one scrambled into my laundry sorter in the basement. I certainly didn't want it jumping on me as I dug through piles of dirty clothes. Nor was I willing to neglect the laundry any longer than I already had. So I called the man of the house.

I really wasn't expecting him to ride majestically down the basement stairs on his white steed, and vanquish the fearful beast, but I figured that at least I would get some moral support. After we both stood staring at the laundry sorter for a few minutes while I scratched my head and he persisted in alternately jumping and shrieking every two-point-six seconds, my husband had a brilliant idea and left me alone with the monster while he went to fetch his long-handled grilling tongs.

What a picture I'm sure we made as my husband gingerly plucked through dirty tee shirts, jeans, and undies with his tongs while I made sure to keep myself safely out of range of his flailing limbs. Somewhere near the bottom of the pile the beast flung itself from the sorter and fled to a safer, darker corner where I am sure it remains, biding its time, making its plans, and growing bigger by the second.