Spiders

For some reason (probably because of the variable weather) a rather unreasonable number of scary brown spiders have been coming out of the woodwork, and crawling creepily about the house. They are very spiderish spiders, with fat, squishy, somewhat bloated bodies, of an unhealthy brown shade, equally alarming legs, and a pair of hairy things bristling from where their mouths ought to be. They are large, at least by the standards of the spiders I am used to, and move in a disturbingly predatory fashion. They look like nothing quite so much as miniature Shelobs, in brown rather than grey. I am not much given to the customary yelling and leaping when I am startled by something. I tend to make a single extremely small noise, and draw abruptly back from the startling object. Sometimes I go so far as to place a hand over my mouth, but by and large, I am rather undemonstrative about it. However there is something about these creatures that seems to completely unnerve me, and I am beginging to do little half-leaps of alarm, and go on at a great rate, in a high pale mouse-voice: "Ooooh, oooh, spider! Oh, they're horrible! Just awful!"

The proper thing to do, of course, is the dispatch the things and be done with it. At the very least, I ought to catch them under a cup, and release them outside, where, with any luck, they will crawl into a lingering snowbank, and freeze to death. Unfortunately, I have a greater horror of the squish the spiders make when they are stepped on, than of the spiders themselves; and, dreadful as they are to look at, the idea of getting near enough to one to catch it fills my mind with terrifying and highly unlikely images of them leaping off the floor and getting on me. I might be able to sneak up and cover one up with a cup, but I cannot bring myself to slide a card beneath and remove him from my dwelling place. As a matter of fact, there is one trapped beneath a coffee cup at this very moment. Hopefully, it will die of something on its own, and soon too, because otherwise, I shall have to figure out what to do with it.... or just plan on doing without that cup for a very long time.