Why do I save spiders?

Ok, I really thought I had gotten over my fear of spiders. At least to the point where I could remove them from my kids’ rooms when needed. You always know when it’s needed. There is no shriek quite as piercing as a child spotting a spider in his/her room, or–even worse–in the shower.

My newfound confidence went right out the window this morning when I was sitting in bed, working on my laptop, and saw movement along the baseboards out of the corner of my eye. Maybe it’s just a cricket, I thought.

Why would a cricket be any better than a spider? Actually, it would be worse. You can’t catch those things, and they JUMP! At least spiders don’t jump. Not spiders this big. Dear god . . . That IS a spider, right?

I crept out of bed and put on my flip flops, then decided to take one off in case it decided to attack. Then I put it back on, because . . . that thing was huge. I didn’t trust my aim with a tiny flip flop against a behemoth arachnid. Smacking at it might just make it mad.

I ran (as quietly as possible) to the kitchen to get a large plastic cup, heart pounding. What if it wasn’t there when I got back? What then? It could be ANYWHERE! Oh my god. The cats were perched on the dining room table as usual, but looking concerned. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s just an enormous spider. You would be helpless against it. Besides, it looks poisonous.”

Back into the bedroom. It was still there. Thank god. I crept closer, and closer, trying to get the cup in position before it spotted me. How do spider eyes work, anyway? Do they have more than two? Can they see in all directions? I feel like I really should know this before trying to sneak up on one.

No matter. The cup is all I’ve got. I brought it down slowly, slowly. It didn’t move. Plunk. Got it! Too late, I realized that the cup wasn’t flat on the floor. It was propped up on the–what do you call that thing at the bottom of the baseboard? A kickplate? My years of binge-watching HGVT failed me. In horror, I watched it go scampering under the door of the closet.

I paused outside the door, cup in hand, for a very long time. Damn it. What now? I can’t start poking around in the closet, it’s sure to drop on me from whatever it’s attached to. I opened the doors and just stared. Eventually I worked up the nerve to slowly push aside a 4-pack of paper towels, expecting it to come charging at me from the other side of the package. Nothing.

I stepped back and noticed the flashlights on an upper shelf. That’s it. I’ll be able to see it better without having to physically enter the closet, and maybe I could paralyze it with the light. I didn’t know if that was possible, but I really, really hoped so. It happens with deer, right? Spider in the headlights?

Just then Betty (cat #1) entered the room. She loves chasing lights. I trained the light on the closet floor, and she ran right in after it. “No, Betty! Don’t scare the spider!” I turned off the light. But before I did, I saw something right there on the floor, in the open, that looked a lot like the spider. I turned the flashlight on again and kept Betty at bay with my foot. I think that’s the spider! Just sitting there! Why is it doing that? Oh my god, it’s actually paralyzed by the light! It was like I had discovered fire.

I brought the flashlight closer and closer, testing the light paralysis theory. It didn’t move. PLUNK. Just like that, he was trapped. Hooray!

Now, how to get him outside? The old “slide paper under cup” trick worked, but I couldn’t pick it up because the paper was flimsy. One wrong move and he would make a break for it–probably down my arm. I had to slide him across the floor, inch by inch, trying not to jump out of my skin listening to him skittering around in there. Six agonizing feet later, I remembered that there was a rug between me and the screen door.

What would McGuyver do? Duct tape. We have duct tape. Feeling accomplished, I ripped up what little duct tape was left on the roll into small strips, and started folding the paper up the side of the glass and taping it in place. Almost done . . . and then the tape ran out. One section of paper was going to be loose when I picked up the cup.

Sigh.

Holding that section tight against the cup with my hand, I maneuvered the screen door open. Carefully, gingerly, I walked him (or her) to the very far end of the yard and put the cup down. It ran around the inside of the cup, but didn’t find the loose section in the paper. Dear lord.

I untaped a few sections and put the cup back down. Thankfully he/she/it found its way out this time.

Hopefully it will not find its way back in the house! Because I’m all out of duct tape.

I don’t believe in ghosts. But I believe in ghost cats.

There are certain places that my departed cats seem to like hanging around. They’re basically the same places they liked to be when they actually walked on four legs–any place where they might get fed, or could play with water.

Often I’ll be standing at the kitchen sink, or at one of the bathroom sinks, and I’ll feel that familiar delicate brushing of the back of my leg with their whiskers or the side of their face, inquiring if dinner is going to be soon. Or the slight flick of their tail as they circle me, winding between my legs and making it impossible for me to take a step for fear of squashing them. Sometimes I’ll feel the cool, “bop bop bop” of a tiny nose tapping against my leg, sniffing for who knows what.

I’ll turn around, and sometimes it’s my actual, living cats. But sometimes there is nothing there.

I’ll look around to see if maybe one of them brushed past me and quickly left the room, but usually I’ll see them both snoozing on their cat beds on the dining room table. Beds that, inexplicably, they refused to get inside, but will make biscuits on the top until they flatten out and become mattresses instead of hidey caves.

They don’t just make themselves known by touch. I’ll also hear them going down the stairs. Always down, never up. I’m not sure why. I’ll be sitting on the couch, right next to the stairs, and hear the unmistakable padding of paws down the stairs, each one followed by the slight click of their toenails. I would like to say that sometimes it’s my actual cats, but there’s never a cat there. Our floors are creaky, but they don’t mimic the sound of a cat walking down the stairs.

But most unsettling is seeing them. I mean, I don’t see them. But my two cats do. Always in our bedroom or closet, and always on the ceiling. They will both pause, look up at the same spot on the ceiling, and then their eyes will dart back and forth, back and forth, always looking at exactly the same spot. I have followed their gaze many times, looking for a bug, or a spider, or a swaying spider web, or a shadow, or a flash of light from outside. There is never anything there. I think, maybe it’s a sound coming from the HVAC system, or a bird or squirrel on the roof, but I never hear anything.

This mostly happens in our walk-in closet, where we have one of our cats’ ashes.

If I thought there were a ghost of a person in my house, I would move the hell out. Even if it was someone I knew and loved. That’s just too creepy. But the cats? I don’t know, it’s kind of reassuring. Like they’re just visiting to make sure everything is ok, maybe giving our cats some pointers about getting at the hidden snacks, sniffing the different foods they’re eating, sniffing their butts.

Our cats don’t seem too concerned about it, so I guess it’s ok with me.

Cat of a Thousand Names

It all started with a case of gender confusion. One of our “twin” cats, Baxter (sister and brother, actually, but they were practically identical), had just passed away after a fairly long and ugly battle with stomach cancer. I wasn’t ready for another cat, but my family had other ideas.

I left for a trip just before the 4th of July, and my parting instructions were: “Don’t get another cat while I’m gone. But if you do, make sure it’s a girl. We don’t want another boy cat beating up poor Betty.” We loved Baxter more than anything, but he really could be an asshole when he wanted to be. Which was any time (1) Betty was anywhere near, (2) he spied something on a surface that should be knocked off–preferably glass and breakable–and (3), breakfast time, which could start as early as 4am with insistent yowling. So, basically most of the time.

There’s Betty. A softy at heart, but always ready with a few claws if necessary.

I wasn’t surprised when I started getting texts with photos of an adorable orange and white kitten.

Enter Waldo.

He was the cutest little thing, athletic and possessing an impressive alley cat swagger at only 3 months. We decided to keep the name Waldo, thinking how fun it would be ask “Where’s Waldo?” every time we were looking for him. There’s no way that would get old, right?

The time came to have Waldo neutered. I took him to the home of the woman his foster mom recommended for his last distemper shot, and she offered to make the appointment through the vet she works with. She flipped him around to have a look at his rear end, and said “Uh . . . I think you mean spayed. This one is a girl!”

Enter Wilma.

We didn’t want to change his–er, her name too drastically, and Wilma was a good fit with Betty, if you’re a fan of the Flintstones. Their coloring even matched their names: Betty has black hair, and Wilma is mostly orange. Cute, right?

Except that somehow the gender switch activated a naming switch, and we started calling her everything under the sun. Wilmer, Wilderama, Wilmy, Wilma Lou, Wilma Lou Hoo, Willy Wonka, Little Willy Willy Won’t . . . Go Home, Silly Willy, Little Willy, Willy Loman, Willy Willy Oxenfree. And probably more that I can’t think of now.

Every morning when it’s time for breakfast, I’ll start calling all of her names (and a few for Betty, just to make sure she doesn’t feel left out), and by the time I finish running through them all, they have both finished eating and are settling down for their morning nap.

Next, I suppose we’ll have to round out the family with a Fred, Barney, Pebbles, Bam-Bam and Dino. I can only imagine how long breakfast will take.

 

 

Looking at life from behind: In no particular order

I have an empty photo frame that has been hanging on our stairway wall for three years. Every now and then, my daughter will ask why I haven’t put any photos in it. Until now, I could honestly say “I have no idea!”

It’s not like we don’t have photos in frames all over the house. We have tons of them. All happy, smiling faces of our family at different points in our lives—soon after J. was born, at the beach, us beaming and her peering out from her Baby Bjorn with an expression both concerned and nearsighted. A posed family Christmas photo when J. was about 6 and S. was a toddler, where only I noticed the slight yellowish bruise on her cheek from the latest episode of S.’s “enthusiastically throwing board books” phase. In front of the Eiffel Tower, the week after Princess Diana died, long before we had any idea how full and chaotic the next 20 years would be.

I kind of felt like, “been there, done that” in the hanging photos department. But the stairway wall was bare, and needed something. So up went the photo frame, and there it sat. Somehow filling it with more of the same types of photos didn’t seem right. This frame should have its own special type of photos.

But what?

Recently I was transferring photos from an old hard drive to my laptop, and it struck me: The photos that I found most poignant were the ones taken from the back. Photos that spoke to me not through the expressions on the subjects’ faces, but their poses, their posture, their surroundings. The photos where no one felt obligated to create a “hey we’re having fun” face, but were simply going about their business, thinking who knows what.

Here’s one of my favorites: A perfect late spring day, after coming home from a joint birthday party for both kids. He was three, she was seven. We had to explain to S. what a pinwheel was, but he was fascinated. He didn’t let go of that pinwheel the rest of the afternoon. Here he’s taking a breather and watching the rest of the kids running and doing cartwheels in the yard. Who knows what was going through his head? Not knowing, I’m free to make up stories about what could have been happening in the photo.

Here’s another one–walking to our first ride on the Tower of Terror (and many more to come):

And there are more:

Even though I know the back story (sorry, pun really wasn’t intended but I like it so I’m keeping it) for all these photos—after all, I was always the photographer—it makes me happy to think that they could have been telling any number of stories. I can make up new ones to match them if I want. There are no faces or expressions to prove me wrong.

Which reminds me of something I sometimes think about: What are the stories of the people who randomly appear in your family photos? What were they doing at that moment? I know what we were doing, but their narrative was completely different that day. And come to think of it, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to locate all the family photos that YOU have randomly appeared in? Those photos alone could tell the entire story of your life, in no particular order.

But that’s a whole separate line of musing that I’ll get into later.

J. and I finally took that empty photo frame off the wall and filled it with a crooked collage of our favorite photos. It took some wrestling (“Aw man, now there’s a HAIR between the two pieces of glass! Ok, take it apart again.”), but now it accurately represents us: Not perfect, a little askew, slightly messy, memories overlapping, mostly happy.

How did I get here?

Well, that’s hard to answer. I guess I could start from one of  two perspectives–where I started, or where I’m going. But either way, that would be kind of a long and boring story. The photo sums it up, though: Either you’re looking for someone or something to tell you what comes next, or you’re focusing on what you decide will come next.  In this case, Betty was locked on a bird, which was a totally unattainable goal. I didn’t tell her that, though . . . I didn’t want to crush her hunter’s spirit. My goals are a little closer to reality: More time with family, more time to enjoy new experiences, and more time to write about them!

Don’t worry, this won’t get too deep. I’m more Captain Obvious (or maybe Jack Handey) than Oscar Wilde.  Maybe there will be some generally motivational thoughts embedded in my random musings. Or maybe not. But there will be kids, cats, recipes, and adventures in freelancing. I’m still new at that part. Advice is welcome.

My thought for today started taking shape at 5 a.m., when my son decided it was time to wake up. Why? Because he got a simple digital watch in his Easter basket, and he had set it so he could wake up on his own. At 7:30. He hasn’t yet learned the meaning of irony.

First I heard him thumping against the wall, which he does when he can’t sleep and rolls back and forth. Then I heard indistinct one-sided conversation, which reminded me of the scene in Finding Dory when she was dreaming.

“No, that was my fault, sorry . . .”

“Where did you find that doggo?”

“That’s my chocolate . . . mmmmm . . .”

“Doggo?”

And suddenly he was in front of me, brandishing his new watch and demanding to go downstairs and read the instructions for how to turn off the hourly alarm. And it made me think: What am I excited about when I get up in the morning? Besides coffee? Sometimes it’s hard to think of something I would jump out of bed for.

So that was my challenge for the day: Come up with something I’m looking forward to about each day. Ok, I’m still thinking about it. So far coffee was the winner for the day. But at least it got me thinking. And hopefully I’ll come up with something new every day.