Handling the Brown Recluse…

Today is warm and beautiful outdoors. I’ve never had a green thumb, yet enticed by the fresh air and clear skies, I head outdoors to work on my back yard.

Mainly, there is much trimming and raking to be done. I hear there are all sorts of trimming rules for the health of your bushes and trees, but I know none of these things. However, I want to host a cook out and clean things up. I haven’t ventured out to maintain anything back there in months.

So I do things the slow way — trim around, step back to look, place chairs, step back to look, trim some more, try to reach here and there — until it looks OK.

I think.

I should have used gloves though. My hands are very sore and my loppers are bent, so their work isn’t the finest or quickest. Or for that matter, painless. Still, the back yard does look better.

I uncover stones and timbers while removing old leaves, and various spiders scurry about. I am reminded of my childhood down at my father’s shop, and the wars I fought against the brown recluse invasion there.

I don’t generally believe in killing spiders, save the dangerous ones.

It was years before my Dad realized I’d told the truth about the poisonous spiders I worked around in the wood room. I wasn’t just being a scared little girl, after all.

Of course, by then I’d learned to cope with my circumstances — by hunting the enemy spiders. By knowing their habits and every move. And by catching them in jars, just in case someone would finally notice — not only the markings, but the numbers.

I was the only one in the family who didn’t wear glasses. My eyesight tested better than the norm at 20/11. Details were obvious to me in an instant from any distance. Though perhaps it was sometimes a curse. I literally could see things that others could not.

It’s my guess that the sheer numbers of brown recluses at Dad’s shop caused them to be less “reclusive” than the experts claim they’re supposed to be. I wonder how many experts have worked in a building practically owned by a recluse “clan.” Though that makes them sound friendlier than they really are.

I turn over a rock in my backyard. Sure enough, there’s the tunnel in the groove and the tell-tale hunched body with the sand-dollar shaped back and famous “fiddle” mark.