Chivalry's not dead, but it does have a pronounced limp
Category: Nature...
Posted Thursday, July 03, 2008 at 03:04 PM [GMT-6]

Note, or rather, confession: I was going to use that post title for a description about how I re-injured my knee running with my wife so she wouldn't have to go out alone, but the moment passed (unfortunately, not the injury). It doesn't fit as well here, but by gosh, ill-fitting content has never stopped me before!

Continuing with the whole neighborhood-overrun-by-big-black-and-hairy-spiders theme that we launched yesterday, I had the opportunity this morning to educate a neighbor on the logic of not being afraid of tarantulas.

MLB and I were finishing our walk with Abbye (MLB took the day off) and we were passing in front of our neighbor's house as she came out to retrieve the newspaper. We exchanged greetings and she headed back to her front door, then paused, uttered a plaintive cry of dismay and jumped back a few inches. I knew without asking the source of her concern.

"Oh...that's the biggest spider I've ever seen!" she exclaimed. I walked up and tried to soothe her feelings. "Has a tarantula paid you a visit?"

It had, and she was accepting no soothing. I asked her if she'd like for me to sweep it off her front porch and she gratefully accepted my offer – pending her running inside to grab her camera to document one more indignity heaped upon her by the West Texas ecosystem (really, don't they have tarantulas in Denver?).

She took the photo, and I swished a broom toward the spider. But it evaded the bristles and scurried behind the bags of cypress mulch stacked against the front porch wall. I dragged the bags away from the wall, broom at the ready – and exposed both the original fugitive plus a compatriot. That was just about more than our neighbor could take, but she composed herself long enough to get another photo of the two spiders, one of which had assumed the aggressive stance, front legs in the air and prepared to urticate (you did learn that word, didn't you?), that makes them look more fearsome than they are.

I opined that this was probably one good reason for not stacking mulch on the front porch, and she assured me that her husband would ensure that the bags were gone as soon as he got home from work. I suspect he'll be presented with visual justification for his impending household chores.

I quickly and firmly swept the two spiders off the porch and onto the driveway. However, each time the little rascals came to a halt, they immediately made a beeline..um...spiderline back toward the front door. I had no choice but to terminate their operations with extreme prejudice in order to salvage our neighbor's psyche.

She was quite grateful for the assistance, obviously taking my assurances that the spiders were harmless as simply more evidence that I was at best a useful fool.

Ironically, when we arrived back at our house, my wife found some black stick-like things laying on the flowerbed border. Upon closer inspection, we determined that they were bits and pieces of tarantula legs. Did I mention that birds eat tarantulas? (I imagine they think they taste like chicken.) It was kind of sad to think that one of our spiders, having escaped unscathed from the aborted Great West Texas Spider Smackdown of 2008 apparently wandered straight into the sights of a mockingbird or grackle. Such are the daily life and death scenarios on the plains of Texas.