I know as well as the next per­son that when you move to a new place you inevitably must deal with new incon­ve­niences. In the south­east these took the form of cock­roaches. In the south­west they were scor­pi­ons, and snakes, and mice, and poi­so­nous spi­ders (wait, why did I like the south­west so much?). In the north­east it’s ice and snow and depress­ingly grey skies. And in the west it was earth­quakes and bugs whose names I never learned because that would have made them all too real. Now that we’re in south­ern Ore­gon, we have bears (cute) and cougars (the ani­mals not the older women; also, cougars?! I kind of thought those were make believe), but hon­estly I’ve never seen either in the eight months we’ve been here (though Bambi and his fam­ily make reg­u­lar appear­ances on our street). What I have seen, in hoards, are spi­ders.

Some­time in mid-June our rental house was invaded with spi­ders. Big spi­ders, small spi­ders, spi­ders on the ceil­ings, spi­ders on the floor, spi­ders smack dab in the mid­dle of the wall, spi­ders in the bath­room, spi­ders in the hall­way, spi­ders on our sheets (!!), spi­ders in the kitchen. Really, spi­ders every­where. And while none of the spi­ders I saw looked par­tic­u­larly poi­so­nous, spi­ders are still the creepi­est crea­tures of all. They have so many legs. And if you look away for even a sec­ond they can fly across the room and dis­ap­pear. And then reap­pear on your face when your sleep­ing. And then they crawl all over you. And then you spend the next two weeks swip­ing at var­i­ous parts of your body because you swear there’s a spi­der there only to have your hus­band tell you it’s just your hair that your baby pulled out when he grabbed a fist­ful and wouldn’t let go, but it’s too late and now the whole world thinks you’re slightly unbal­anced because you keeps swip­ing at your­self and oh-my-god spi­ders freak me out so much that I write stupid-long run-on sen­tences. Some­one stop me.

Now, most days Caleb and Sadie and I are home alone, so spider-dealing-with is up to me (at least until Caleb is old enough to have decent hand con­trol and then I’m mak­ing him do it; he’s a boy so he’ll prob­a­bly think it’s super cool), and while I’m gen­er­ally a live and let live kind of per­son, I draw the line at spi­ders in my house. I’ve seen the whole cap­ture them and let them loose out­side manuever, but I have three prob­lems with this approach:

1. You have to get rel­a­tively close to the spi­der in order to extract it and move it out­side.
2. Once it’s out­side it could con­ceiv­ably come back inside at some point and/or I could walk into it’s web out­side or have it land in my hair when I’m out water­ing plants.
3. In the process of cap­tur­ing and trans­port­ing said spi­der the sneaky thing could crawl all over me.

For these very sane rea­sons I apol­o­gize to the spi­der and God and kill them. On the spot. With no mercy. I like to think I’m kind about it: I do it quickly and I make sure they’re really, really, really dead (so they don’t suf­fer — or, you know, come back to life), but there’s no get­ting around it. I’m a spi­der killer.

Even so, there are occa­sions on which I call Adam at work and force him to drive the two miles home to kill a spi­der because it is either too freak­ing huge to be believed and I can’t approach it for fear it will eat my head off, or it is out of my reach. In exchange for this ser­vice, I have been known to offer up var­i­ous house­hold chores that now include putting the baby to bed (a time con­sum­ing affair that can involve many attempts and leave one wiped of the desire to go on being awake them­selves).

Nev­er­the­less, most of the time I kill my own spi­ders because I’m grown-up like that, but in order to con­vince Adam of the enor­mity of our prob­lem, I began keep­ing track of the num­ber of spi­ders I was killing on a dry erase board we keep by the garage. Sadly I for­got to mark the date I began, so I had to start over yes­ter­day in order to accu­rately cap­ture the invasion-like-scope I’m expe­ri­enc­ing. But, prior to eras­ing the marks and begin­ning again, I was up to 21 spi­ders. 21. Spi­ders.

Some­how mark­ing them down makes me feel more pow­er­ful. And gar­ners me more sym­pa­thy. And makes me feel pro­duc­tive. So what if I didn’t shower today? I killed five spi­ders. Beat that.

(Oh, and sorry spi­ders, I hope there is a lovely after­life for you. Please don’t haunt me.)