The One Thing You Hope Will Never Happen To You Ever.

The trees in my yard are not normal. They are odd. Different. Slow. Autumnally challenged, you might say. Everyone else's trees start to change color in early to mid October. By late October, the leaves from my neighbors' yards on both sides of me have blown onto my yard. Soon their trees are nearly bare. In the meantime, my trees are still bright green and haven't lost a single leaf. By early November, the whole neighborhood is bare. Except my trees. They're still going strong--green and bushy. Then one day in mid-November I will wake up and every leaf on every tree in my yard will have leapt to its death. My car will be covered, the driveway will be covered, the sidewalk will be covered. Every inch of grass within 10 feet of the trees will be covered, 3 inches thick. So then there is no putting off raking. It's an all or nothing occurance at our house. Well, this event took place last night. So today I got out my gardening gloves and rake and prepared to get to work filling 18 gigantic black construction clean-up bags with leaves. Let me stop and point out here that I don't garden like I used to. I really enjoy gardening. But I'm not that good at it. I get really excited about it in the spring, but by late summer I've lost interest. I no longer remember to water or weed or pick. So my garden gets overgrown and weedy and dead. Because of this trend, this past summer I didn't do a garden at all. My gardening gloves sat idle in a little plastic cupboard on my deck for about 5 months. Now back to my story. I got out my gloves and rake to start raking up the leaves today. I have these nice, bright green, suede gloves that I used to garden with. I put one on and tried to work through the stiffness it had from being outside in the cold. And then I stuck my hand into the other one. I felt something soft and wolly inside one of the fingers and I instantly knew, knew in the core of my heart, that whatever was in there was NOT RIGHT. There should not be anything wolly or soft or squishy inside that glove. If it was a wool glove or a cotton glove, you might expect that sort of fuzz. But not in a suede glove. So I shrieked and ripped it off. My heart was pounding as I looked down into the darkness of the middle finger. I could see something white in there. Just like sock fuzz. But I couln't tell what it was. I shook it, and a little bit of white cottony stuff came out. I stared at it wondering what it might be and figured it must just be some random cotton or wool or other unknown substance that would have every reason to be there. Just none that I could think of immediately. Still, the leaves were waiting, so I tried to put the glove on again. This time my finger made it a few centimeters farther. But then it touched more of the strange wolly mass, and my stomach lurched again with the instinctual knowledge that I should not be touching it, whatever it was. Finally, unable to bear the pounding in my chest, I got out a chopstick and started digging. And you'll never guess what came out. A SPIDER NEST. I stuck my finger into a fuzzy cocoon of tiny baby spiders. And their mother. I almost passed out and threw up in one motion. Then I threw the whole thing into the sink and turned the water on full blast. I began dancing around and shaking my finger and screeching as I relived the realization that I'd touched a spider den just a few seconds before. My husband came running into the kitchen, assuming I'd just cut off a finger or something. "Spider babies!" was all I could get out. He seemed a bit alarmed for a second too as he asked me where they were. "In my glove," I panted. "Dead." He looked at me for a moment. "Dead?" he asked. "Oh." Then he rolled his eyes and walked out, like sticking your hand into a web of dead spider babies is any less horrifying than a web of live ones. OK, maybe it is less horrifying. But only by a hair. Still, I wouldn't have thought this was something you had to experience for yourself to catch the magnitude of. But clearly it must be. I heard him mumble something about girls as he retreated to his warm spot on the couch.

To finish the story off (as if anything else matters after a direct encounter with a spider nest), I let the glove stay under the stream of water while I proceeded to beat it steadily with my meat tenderizing hammer. Then I let it dry out slightly. Then I threw it on the sidewalk, sprayed it with hairspray, and lit it on fire. I then had to run for the hose when the carpet of leaves nearby began to burst in to flames. But I got it all under control. The spiders are assuredly dead now. Dead-ER, I guess. My hand has been thoroughly sanitized, scrubbed, held under scalding water, and bandaged. And I will now go and finish raking the leaves. One-handed.