We all know that as soon as your spouse leaves on deployment or a long TDY, something very important that you cannot live without in your house will suddenly, with no warning, break. And it will be something that, try as you might, you cannot fix alone.
But that doesn’t happen in this house. We have a different problem: spiders.
It goes like this: I rarely see any spiders in my house. My husband swears he never sees any either. Yet every single time he goes away, a giant spider appears somewhere very inconvenient within a week.
Oh, did I mention I’m absolutely terrified of spiders? I am afraid that if I get too close – as in, within killing range – they will jump on me. The only way I can convince myself to kill them is by vacuum. And the vacuum doesn’t always reach the place from which the spider is taunting me. So inevitably I have to call my mother (who lives across the country) and make her talk me through the process. It's excruciating. *
Last fall we changed stations to a place with a population of even larger, hairy spiders (who also, presumably, excel at jumping on people named “Amy”) than our last post. And now that my husband will be missing for some time, I’m starting to wonder if Murphy’s Spider Law has followed me here. So far we have been free of the problem. But we’re still well within the assault window.
Murphy, are you watching me?
*(I don’t want to hear your reasons in the comment section for why a fear of spiders is irrational. And I really don’t want to hear about how vacuums don’t actually kill spiders. You are not going to trick me into loving spiders and you are not going to convince me to try another form of spider death, so I beg you not try).
