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| Daddy long-legs cluster |
My
primary time frame is 17th century London. It’s difficult to write
of it and not go textbook, something I hated as a kid in school. What I’ve
learned over my career is to fill a story that resonates with human interest. History
does not change, only the names and circumstances, although even then, too much
of the past rings the same in the present these days.
But I
digress. Spring has sprung and so have the spiders...
Take
idiocy as a human interest story. Most people don’t like to admit to this, but
it happens on an almost daily basis. Husband and I had one of those occasions
this last week.
 |
| Close Look at Cluster |
We have
daddy long-legs spiders. Lots of them. Hundreds of them, maybe a thousand
(kidding, but not far from). They don’t build cobwebs of gossamer that spread
across the house facade as if we were in a terrible fairy tale. No, they cluster
in the eaves above our sliding glass door. They foul the clapboard with their
poop, fall on our heads as we come and go. It’s creepy and annoying. We can’t sit
on the patio because of them. People from miles around hear my screams, night
and day as I take our pup out for her potty rituals.
Last
week, Husband wearied of my constant screeches, my jumping about and shaking
the bugs from my hair and down my collar. He marched outside and grabbed the
garden hose. Like a soldier ready to forge into battle, he sprayed the spider clusters
with steady jets of water.
They
plopped like giant, wet shaggy balls onto our patio and lay there stunned. In
an angry zest of nature, they freaked out, separated into thousands of crawly
things with unnatural long legs. They ran up the wall, the sliding glass doors
on both sides of the screen, stalked into a window corner and stayed there. Now,
no one could come or go at all. Should we open the slider, an arachnid cluster
would scurry into our house.
On that
note, many did find their way into our house, (I know not how because it is a
tightly built structure), and settled on the walls of our bedroom. Outside, the
entire wall was covered with them, all vibrating up and down as if in a macabre
dance.
 |
| Macabre dance all over our wall |
As the
days blurred by, they took to their clusters again, but not just one gigantic
one. In their mindless fervor for revenge, several clusters evolved, from over
the sliding glass door and down the underside of the eaves of our house and
patio.
Now, we’ll
have poop paths that run the full backside of our house.
Nightmare!
As a
human interest story, I hope you felt what I felt, panicked when I did. That’s
what I learned from years of writing. Don’t tell these things. Show them so
that the reader stands with you, witnesses the horrific skin crawling insect
moments that I did.
PS… No
spiders were harmed in the telling of this tale.
~*~*~*~*~
Many thanks to Wikicommons Public domain for the pics.
Martin
Parker is a very happily married man, so when his first love, Diane
Branden, blows back into town – still a force to be reckoned with – he
is not prepared for the fallout. Drawn unwittingly into her carefully
spun web, upheaval quickly follows as his world immediately begins to
skid sideways.
