Cleaning House in the Woods

Who left the door open?

Is that a stink bug? Centipede? Scorpion? Please don’t make him mad!

Really, how many hours can a person spend vacuuming into the dark crevasses where carpet meets wall? Where dust and decaying insects merge in an aluminum window frame?  Until it’s done, I imagine, since everything looks so fresh when the dead flies have all been removed, though I daresay many an arachnid will go hungry tonight when they discover their anticipated sumptuous feast has been pilfered. 

And they have to be hungry all the time. These little guys work hard. Anyone who has ever heard the sound of natural Velcro ripping when separating the folds of a curtain can appreciate the insane industriousness of these tireless creatures.  Tall condominiums of webbing are demolished in our thoughtless pursuit of cleanliness.

I catch my forehead against a thin strand in flight across the living room. Where is she, this Cristo of the insect world? How does she make those tornado cones of webbing in the windowsill? And when two spiders face off at the site of an unlucky moth’s demise, are they polite?

You gonna eat that?

At least the big one wiped her feet when she waltzed into the kitchen from the back door.

The children playing in the rock room late at night saw her first. We, the adults, were all sipping cocktails on top of the granite boulders outside, watching for falling stars. Big spider in the kitchen, they said. “ I’ll take care of that,” I smiled as I slipped back in through the living room window, thinking “these city kids, how cute that they’re afraid of spiders. “

But, hmmm. Yes, well, they were not exaggerating. Our guest was forced to spend an undignified night in a glass jar (with holes in the lid) until she was identified the next morning by our park ranger neighbor as a harmless female brown tarantula. Delighted that this creatures was now friend, not foe, the kids took turns putting their hands beside her for comparison (she won) as she inched her way to freedom into the weeds. I’m sure she was the talk of several elementary schools that week. “Yeah sure, how big?”

 Not all guests are so harmless.

While sweeping the kitchen floor, I glanced into the office, looked down, back up, and put the broom down. The jar trick wasn’t going to work for this guy. A juvenile Southwestern Rattlesnake is too fast for me. But maybe he’ll leave on his own? If I turn my back and he’s gone, I can’t be sure of which dark cupboard, or which warm comforter, he’s crawled into. Isn’t this a fine pickle? I hated to drag him away from his Upwords Scrabble game; perhaps he was merely trying to improve his vocabulary. And what’s the harm in that? But I had work to do.

A half an hour of dancing with snake placed this young gentleman under a sizable mixing bowl. The tricky part was inserting a thin cutting board underneath quick enough to keep him from escaping. Really, it makes one want to give up house cleaning and move out to yard work. 

Yes, something easy, like emptying the buckets of the rainwater, … only to discover the poor little field mice that found out the hard way they can’t swim. Where is the neighbor’s cat when you need her? Sleeping on the job, or at least on my front porch armchair.

Maybe gardening then: something less confrontational. Let’s see: gloves, pick axe, hat, chainsaw…  and after an exhausting day in the sun moving rocks and brush isn’t it nice to come home to a clean house?