Oh Nose!

I am a human person, and come with most of the regular add ons.  Ten fingers, ten toes, at least one chin.  Eyes.  Elbows.  A belly that has people cheerfully asking when I’m due, a wizard’s lock of grey hair.

Me at Publix.

But my favorite feature—my proudest feature by far—is my nose. My perfect, perfect nose.

Noses are very useful—they hold up your glasses, they tell you when it’s time to wash your clothes, they are invaluable in face-making from the snarl to the snarf.  Everyone should love their nose.  I love mine very much.

Did you know that the one thing we’re
sure of about how Cleopatra looked
 was that she had an arresting nose?
No images of her have survived,
but records exist of people talking smack
because she was a g-d BOSS
and they were mad about it,
and they mention her nose. 
I bet her nose was perfect, too. 
I bet she loved that nose. 
Get 'em, Cleo. 

How I feel about my nose.

I use it to point!  I use it to scrunch!  I have expertly honed using it in every day life to express a wide variety of emotions!

I have a sister and we look nothing alike—it’s like she got our dad’s eyes and mom’s face, and I got the opposite.   So she got mom’s nose, and I got dad’s.  And her nose is lovely—many noses are.  There are many well-formed noses out there.  But my nose is perfect.  It is def dad’s family nose—you look at my grandpa, my cousins, my aunt, and it’s right there, looking back at you. There is a lot of heritage in this nose, a lot of family history.  I have a standing arrangement with my eggs that if I ever do have a baby and it’s not wearing this nose, it’s going back in.

Pops, sporting the family schnoz circa 1945

Which is why it was particularly harrowing when I tried to break it at my last boxing class.  I know, I know, it’s boxing, what did I expect?  But that’s not…what happened.  Here’s the thing…

Boxing starts with like a seven minute “conditioning” period before you put your gloves on where you are regretting that you continue to make this choice and resent that even after three whole 

I feel like this should all be going much faster.

classes you are def still not in shape, you’ve been doing this for moments now, when do your clothes start to fit again?  And you wonder who invented “mountain climbers” anyway and then resolve to be a better boxer in case you ever 

encounter that person in the flesh at, say, arm’s length.  

Really gets you jazzed to give 110% in the rest of the class. 

THEN you put your gloves on, which is when you might notice that you were given two left gloves when you came in and you need to go get a righty.  And so you grab the offending instrument and head out of the room that the class is in, swift-like-a-bunny so as to not miss any of this wretched, exhausting, self-inflicted, satisfying, terrible violence.  You’re distracted, and hurrying.  And suddenly you have this quick, quiet voice in your head saying, “wait, that’s a-”

Wall.  It was a wall.

And THEN you slam face first into a plate glass window, crushing your perfect nose and interrupting the whole class and enacting the dumbest, gimmee-est, low-hanging-fruit-est gag from every cliché comedy ever.  Cliché because- that doesn’t happen in real life.  Except it does!  Or at least, it did. 

Class is now interrupted, since everyone thinks you’re part of some underground film crew punking them because obviously no one actually walks right into glass walls.  

Was it the glass door you walked into?  It was not, because they have kindly put decals all over the door, presumably to prevent just such a scenario.  In fact, it was probably the decals that caused you, in your hurry, to avoid the doors, because you thought the open seeming space next to them was definitely a much better way to try and exit the room.

Being a good citizen, you have now done your civic duty by leaving your own decal on the window, in the form of a detailed imprint of your face and ego smashing into said window.

Things that might, hypothetically, run through your mind should this situation happen to you:

This is such bull....

Ow

Stop looking at me

Ow

Is that snot or blood?

Am I going to work with a black eye tomorrow?

Hey, my glasses aren’t broken!  Zenni for life!

How do I make them stop looking at me?

I still need that other glove

Ow

Ow

So I run out like everything is cool, switch my glove, and come back like my head isn’t exploding and start boxing.  This makes sense, because embarrassed people don’t make good choices.

Luckily the boxing room is covered in mirrors (with one notable exception….) so I could check out the damage, which amounted to a blunt force trauma abrasion on my now very tender nose.  Did I 

I can't actually do this, because
it might involve touching my nose.

check this out like a normal person?  No I did not, I did it surreptitiously while trying to act like everything was fine.  Perhaps also luckily, I was now full of enough adrenaline to actually give that 110%.  DEFINITELY also luckily, my hands were sheathed in danger mittens for the rest of class so I couldn’t poke at my increasingly sore and swollen nose.

The next day, I was struggling with some basic functions I have clearly been taking for granted for far too long.  Like blowing my nose, how much I rely on scrunching for emotional expression, and ever touching my glasses.  

Did you know that in the Dominican Republic, the non-verbal
for "what?" is scrunching your nose, rather that the American
raising of the eyebrows?

Fortunately for me, it seems that when this nose was gifted to my family line in times of yore, whatever wood elf we bribed included enchantments of protection in the general nose perfection spell.  Anyway, it’s not broken, I did not wake up

Yeah...you seem clumsy, I'll throw in the protectives for free.

the next day with a black eye—which is great because I had two meetings that day where making a good first impression was important and the only thing I could think of when I opened my eyes in the morning was how was I going to out-finesse walking in like I came from a mugging.  Answer: HAHAHAHA there’s no answer to that, I would just be screwed.  It’s not like you can just tell people you walked into a glass wall, they won’t believe you because that doesn’t happen in real life.  Best case scenario, concerned women come up to me after the meeting to tell me he’s not worth it.  (“Andy” was very sweet and concerned about my general whole-ness and well-being, butandalso was concerned with my potential bruising in a slightly different way than had even occurred to me.)

Day two was more sore than day one.  Also the internet says I still might get some bruising, which would be awesome in advance of my niece’s fifth birthday party.

I can't think of a better way to meet all her little short friend’s parents.  “Yeah, I box and am clumsy, that’s def true because I totally wouldn’t tell you about my fight club, do you need a babysitter?”  My sister would super appreciate the great impression I will make on her peers, and my nieces will look at me with the awe that my role modeling deserves.

We should not overlook how much of a baby I am being about this.  I mean it’s sore, but it’s not killing me and it’s a localized pain.  And yet. 

I can't have nice things.

Uncomfortable

I am uncomfortable.  Distractingly so.  For reasons I did to myself.  And that I am both committed to, and deeply rethinking.  

I took a boxing class.  Well, at this point I have taken two. 

I used to live 20 min from a small Muay Thai kickboxing gym.  At the time I worked from home except when I had meetings, and one day on the way home from a meeting just I stopped by and went in, asked them all about it.  It was this simple place, smallllll weight room, one tread mill in the corner, and a big room with mirrors on one side and a mat covering the floor.  Smelled like what it was, but not in a gross way…sort of in a comforting way. 

The owner was behind the little counter, and I watched him watching me walk in.  To say I looked out of place would be a gross underqualification of the situation.  I am wearing my work dress and work shoes, white lady in pearls, with the body of not-a-contender, asking about the class schedule in this tiny smelly gym while in the background people are training to beat people into submission in a ring.  Let me be clear: I am 

This may well kick your ass...
but not in the same way.

calling it Mai Tai, like the drink.  That is not how you pronounce Muay Thai.  He looks bemused, but sure, fine, he’s between classes, he’ll answer my questions.  Shows me around, a process that takes mere moments, and there’s posters all over of him in matches (Bouts?  Tourneys?  Feats?) where he beat other people into submission.  

We sort of get to the end of this brief social experiment, and I ask him, why Muay Thai?  What’s the difference between this and all the hundreds of other martial arts, why has he focused here?  And he looks a little sheepish, then squints, and I watch his face be like, ok lady, I’ll play.  He says, “Well…it’s the most vicious.”  

I'm listening....

I came back the next day, took my free class.  The instructor was late, there were like 6 of us (this is the 11 am class, which I can do, because I work from home).  Guy sees me, he’s like, yeah, you’re new, cool, whatever.  Everyone else is on a first name basis, and the way this class is organized, people pair up and attack each other.  One person has the gloves, the other has the pads, then you switch who is throwing and who is catching.  He shows me what to do, and man, I do it.  After the 

Something to know about...

class, this instructor that just accepted me and didn’t make a big deal out of it explains to me he used to be a cop, and he volunteers with female military personnel to teach self-defense classes related to women not getting sexually assaulted in the military.  He is definitely teaching people to fight, not just get a workout.  I loved it.  I loved it so hard.  Was ready to sign up immediately, even though at the end of it my hands were shaking so much I could barely hold a pen.

As an adult, I was on a kick ball team once
(the kind where people are drinking beer on the field)
and the whole team knew I would stand in the field
 but they were going to have to
actually do everything, because I was garbage.
  I made it up in flip cup at the team bar after the game.

The thing is, I like being a healthy feeling person, using my body and all that, but not just…for the sake of it.  I have never in my life been a good athlete.  I never did sports in school.  I will never be able to throw or catch well.  Hitting the weight room will never be fun for me, nor will the aerobics class, nor will the high impact whatever thing where you throw heavy balls or flip a tire over or do that weird rope thing.

This is not a realistic life experience.

But I like hitting things.  The reason is in the action, the motions make sense in my body.  It makes sense that you hit with your hips as much as your arms, that you stand the way you do, that you move the way you do.  Wall sits make no sense.  It makes sense that it hurts, but I am immediately aware that sitting against a wall is an unnatural and, frankly, unnecessary thing to do.  My brain is not sold on this whole, it’s a good workout thing—it’s dumb.  And hard.  And when hard things are dumb, I just…consider that I could not be doing them, and then I don’t.

Hitting things is not like that.  Hitting things is fun.  Knowing how to clock someone isn’t a bad tool to have in your tool box, and it is a satisfying use of my body.  I loved that class.  

But I quit going-  life happened, and also I moved further away from it (proximity is important—I want to hit things but not enough to drive 30 minutes).

Not that bad, it turns out.

So I sat around doing nothing for another year and a half, but when I moved in with the boyf, I looked into other vicious class opportunities over on this side of town. There is a Krav Maga place like 7 minutes away (again, proximity) and I have heard good things about Krav Maga.  I went to check it out, and the local SWAT team was upstairs training, which seems like a rousing endorsement.  It was suuuuuuper expensive…but they had a “2 free weeks” deal so I figure, fine, we’ll try that.

I go, and there’s this guy there who is SO EXCITED to welcome a woman to the class that he ruins my entire night.  He's not flirting, no, that's not the kind of guy he is.  

He's helping.  

Sweet girl?

Not really that sweet.

He couldn’t imagine that a sweet girl like me had any idea what I was doing, I needed a guide and protector to explain every tiny thing to me, and he was def just the hero to do it.  The instructor allowed this to happen, and I didn’t know how to tell him to leave me alone without yelling "LEAVE ME THE $#!^ ALONE” at the top of my lungs, which seemed like the wrong choice.

Until he broke my glasses.  He has been so exuberantly explaining things to me all class that I have barely thrown a punch the whole time, right up to him interrupting the combo we are right in the middle of doing to show me some nugget of Israeli military wisdom.  So while I am leaning forward in a punch, he is no longer prepared to catch that punch, he is now leaning in to show me, again, what a punch is.  We connect in my front facial region, and he snaps the corner of my glasses. 

I did not go back to that class.

I tried going to a local gym after this but like….again, I can’t make myself care about sitting on a weight machine.  I even tried meeting with a goon (some people call them “trainers”) to motivate myself, but something about the combo of their attitude and my attitude was not a good fit.  (Their attitude that obvs you are here in the pursuit of ripped, sexy, peak physical perfection, and my attitude that I low key think all this is dumb, and I do not even know my goon’s last name, so them yelling at me to not let them down is not a motivation.) 

So I haven’t been working out in a while.  But then…they got me. 

The other night, I’m dicking around minding my own on facebook, and I come across an ad that has, with the laser focus of society-destroying algorithms, been put right in front of exactly me to sing its sweet siren song.  There is a woman owned boxing gym with a diverse group of trainers at a gym 9 minutes from my office that has a new, special deal on their new, special boxing classes.  You have to move fast, or the deal will be over!  What’s it cost?  None of your business!  Sign up now and you’ll reserve your spot! 

I obviously do this.  (Man, fb, you’re good.)

Next day, I call them and say, ok but what’s the deal?  I end up going in that night and trying their class.  It is taught by the most exuberant 12 year old I have ever met.  Seriously, he “ma’am-ed" me at one point, which was adorable.  

This is not a hit-other-people class, it is a hit-these-100lb-heavy-bags class, and it’s full.  I’m there early, so he says hi, helps me wrap my hands into gauntlets so even if I don’t actually do anything I get to look cool, and asks me if I know all the punches.  There are 6 basic punches, and we go through them right quick, and he’s like, “oh—you’ve done this before, you got this, great,” and leaves me alone.  ß easiest way for me to like gym goons, though let’s be honest, I am going to hate you anyway.

Boxing gauntlets!

I come home a wreck—but a happy wreck.  But a wreck.  They have my money (and it’s actually a reasonable cost), and they have classes every day.  I sign up to go back later in the week, and come home to presumably collapse into bed—but noooooooo.

omg just go to sleep....

My body is in crisis mode.  They made me do jumping jacks.  Do you know, Reader, how out of character it is for me to jump?  They made me move around on my feet for a whole hour, not in a sustained, steady pace, but in an attempt at speedy foot work.  Do you know how the-opposite-of light on my feet I am?  My body refused to sleep, because my lizard back brain was like, we are under attack!!!!!  Wait, are we still under attack?!?

This is my speed.

They had also asked me to engage in something called resting motion, which is where your “break” from the intense three minutes of hitting a hundred pound bag as hard as you can is supposed to involve, say, squats.  I was having none of that.  Maybe we’ll get there, or maybe die in a fire, even being here is a win, plus my gauntlets look cool.

The next day….it would be wrong to say I was sore, in the way I think of being sore after a particular work out.  I was more…incredibly, distractingly uncomfortable all over.  Like at work, I could absolutely engage in any consuming meeting or task.  But if I was, say, reading an article, I actually wasn’t, because that activity is not loud enough to drown out my body screaming quietly in the background.  My whole body. 

I tell this to people who work out, and they’re like, that’s great!  Which is objectively wrong, and how I know they are alien people and not to be trusted.  This is not great.

But.  Hitting things is fun.  Plus I paid them.  So I went back, and as I write this it is the day after that.  Part of the reason I am writing this is because just sitting around is terribly full of that same low key screaming from my whole body.  I still didn’t sleep well, because while I am exhausted, my subconscious is certain ze Germans are coming.  If this is not my best post, it is because I can’t find humor in anything and I keep getting distracted by a body I have been successfully ignoring for a long time at this point that is not filled with joy that I have reached back out.

But, I signed up for my next class, so we’ll see. 

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Bad Bread

This is an image of a modern Bedouin woman in Jordan, baking.
But since the most ancient bread ever discovered is Jordanian,
I thought her image might could celebrate the frigging genius,
 the gift to humanity, who first brought
delicious bread to the world 14,000+ years ago.

Breadmaking is an ancient art, recently proved more ancient that previously thought.  It’s a complete mystery to me how it happened in the first place—there are so many steps to this process.  I mean, who thought that would work?  They say now that bread predated agriculture-- so folks just went out and found wheat, ground it up, mixed it with water, added yeast, got it nice and oveny, and called it dinner. 

Now that I grow my own yeasty things, it’s even more mystifying.  Someone made flour, got it wet a.k.a. super goopy and sticky, then just left it until they noticed it smelled funny and was getting larger.  Then they were like, perfect, lets cook that mess til it has a crust and put soup in it.  I mean, I make kombucha, which is ostensibly weirder because there is a slimy thick membrane growing on it, but still.  Hats off to the visionary who knew in her bones this was a good, edible idea.

Baking with yeast has always intimidated me.  You have to buy a packet of this mustardy looking stuff that is alive, and then there are all these steps and waiting and kneeding and whatever.  I tried to make cinnamon rolls once, and we can call that a failure.  Zero out of ten would make again. 

My cinnamon rolls were like that.

On the farm the girls made bread all the time and I was happy to eat it, but kept out of the kitchen during the whole process.  No thank you, voodoo ladies, I will keep to my messy art projects and leave the witchcraft to you.  Except for beerbread, which is basically made out of beer and butter and is delicious and deliciously easy to make.

But now I do my own fermenting witchcraft, and I got…curious.

Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled
microorganisms classified
as members of the fungus kingdom.

I mean, what even is yeast.  And what is dry yeast?   I know there is living yeast in many containers and communities in my kitchen, but how does that get dehydrated down to a powder while still not dying?  There are different strains of yeast…right?  Do they do different things?  What is champagne yeast and how is it different than baking yeast and why can I use either to start a ferment if I don’t feel like harvesting wild yeast?  And what even is wild yeast?!?

So I’m thinking about all this, and also about my peach bug situation.

Ginger beer does not have much alcohol.
But it also does not have no alcohol,
a lesson I learned by accident.

Also I started looking for this pic
searching "drunk girl".  I do not
recommend that search experience.

Because I know you care about my life, Reader, you know I

 have a ginger bug.  Ginger bug is what you call the ferment that happens when you add ginger and sugar to some water every day, and yeast happens (but what is it tho) and it gets bubbly.  It is used to make ginger beer, or really any other natural soda—you mix up a sweet flavored whatever, add some of the liquid from the bug, and let it sit in an airtight container for a couple of days.  The yeasts eat the sugars and poop out a little alcohol and a lot of carbonation, and when it gets where you want it to be, you put it in the fridge.  I have played with a couple of flavors, even though they all start with the ginger bug.

Science!!!

Then one day I started thinking, why ginger?  Is it just the flavor?  If you’re fermenting pickles, you can do it with any veggie…will other things work?

So I decided to make a peach bug.  I did the same thing as with the ginger bug, I added some peach and sugar every day.  I even put some ginger bug in there to begin with, to get the party started.  And it worked!  I have a new happy ferment colony on the kitchen counter!  I even made peach soda out of it.  It was lovely.

But not lovely enough.  Peaches cost more than ginger, and while the soda is good, it’s not good enough to keep me buying peaches.  The bug is alive and thriving, so I don’t want to kill it.  I made it (and paid for all those peaches), so I don’t want to waste it.  It needs to be tended every day like the ginger bug….but I don’t want to bother about it.  I am industrious enough to do all these projects but now I am doing all these projects and it is becoming a hassle to keep up with them all.  So what do I do with my peach ferment?

I make Bad Bread.

As mentioned in my last post, Bad Bread is sourdough unlimited by the confines of the scientific exactitude that good bread really requires.  I like to think of it as artisanal, closer in nature to whatever our breadmaking ancestors were doing before they actually knew how to make bread, a process which in today’s world is easily understood, accessed, and duplicated.

Ima do it anyway.

But that’s how you make good bread, and I was making Bad Bread.

I looked up all the recipes and they were like, sourdough needs a starter and you need yeast.  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I thought, and went to eye my ingredients.

I have peach bug a-plenty, and theoretically that is full of the same yeast (WHY IS IT THE SAME YEAST, HOW DOES ANYONE KNOW THAT, WHO IS THE YEAST PSYCHIC, DO YOU OFFER CLASSES??).  How much peach bug is equivalent to the amount of dry yeast that other, less brave, more interested-in-the-quality-of-their-final-product souls might use?  Meh, I don’t know.

Throw it out?
What if I need it later??

I have whey, because I overferment my kefir constantly so I strain it to make farmers cheese and I can’t bring myself to throw anything away. The internet says you can use that in place of water, and that’s more yeast right there.

I have regular flour that’s not the bread making flour that the internet suggests. 

And I have non-iodized salt.  We’re totally doing this.

I am nailing it.

The internet says to measure baking ingredients by weight, not volume, so I get out my trusty food scale.  There was a whole adventure there that basically centered around me thinking I was a crazy person for a while but we can sum it all up with: the food scale is broken.  It works, it shows numbers.  It’s just wrong.  Like way wrong.

So I go back to doing this by volume, and measure out five and a half cups of flour.  I am not precise about it, because I just went through a whole thinking-I-was-crazy adventure and I have become frustrated.  Reader, if you have ever baked, you know that it is a scientific process and the details matter, the quantities matter, and precision matters.  I also know this.  I just...didn’t care anymore—frankly that ship sailed when I decided I could probably just invent sourdough out of the wrong ingredients. 

Nailing it.

So I get it close enough, and I add a cup of the peach bug juice.  Why a cup?  Because it’s a nice round number.  Whatever.  For the rest of the liquid I use the whey.

Now you’re supposed to let it sit for an hour, so all that liquid can soak into all that flour.  This activates the gluten and also the yeast is doing something and really I don’t know, I just skimmed the recipe. 

Nailing it.

After a while you’re supposed to start pulling the bottom dough up and stretch it over the top like a happy gluteny blanket every 30 min or so, for like 3 hours.  I am not Johnny on the spot with the 30 minutes, so I do it for longer, and in this time it is supposed to get a little air-pocket-y and more or less start to seem like a dough ball and not a pile of wet flour.

This does not occur.

 My..my yeast is perfect....

Undeterred, I look up the next step—let it hang out in the fridge overnight.  Well.  This just seems ridiculous; I am a little concerned (and maybe slightly oversensitive) about my homegrown yeast which is perfectly good yeast, thank you very much, but not doing much in the air pocket-making department at this point.  If there’s one way to shut yeast down, it’s by getting it cold.  So insteaaaaad I do the opposite of that, and put it in the garage overnight.  Just on the floor in there, with a towel over it—it’s nice and warm in the garage, and probably there aren’t inquisitive mice or bugs to get into it, but who really knows, I spend most of my time in the actual house. 

The next day there are more bubbles!  The yeast is yeasting!  But the dough is still…sloppy.  Gloppy.  Not dough-ball-y.  Idk if this is because my flour-to-liquid ratio is off, or because my yeast isn’t doing, or because of any of a number of other reasons why my innovative, resourceful, not-based-on-science recipe might not be behaving like regular recipes should.  I try to do that “wrap in a gluten blanket” thing some more but at this point the dough is not having it.  I look up troubleshooting websites, and they tell me my dough might be 

Gloriously off the map.

overfermented.  This means my yeast has actually over-yeasted, which feels like a particularly unkind suggestion given my sensitivity over the matter.  But, the websites assure, also maybe not that—maybe lots of things; how would one know, we are off the map here.

I put it in the fridge at one point because dough wants to go in the oven cool, apparently.  It….is not structurally sound, however.  All the recipes are like, this is where you form it into the shape you want it to bake in, with all the cunning and charming designs you score into the top of it, so it comes out ready to dazzle and delight!  My dough is more of a free spirit; it will not be hussied up to dance to society’s expectations. 

This is not what sourdough should look like.
But it was yummy!

I put it in a casserole and I bake it.  Aaaaaaaand….it was ok.  

It was ok!  It had a great flavor, but the consistency of a hockey puck.  People ate it....though something in it made “Andy” have a lip-swelling allergic reaction.  Maybe wild yeast is wilder than I thought.  I still have peach bug left so I’ll probably make it again, and just warn “Andy” first.

I chalk it up as a win.

Bad Bread for life.

  

New Neighbors

“Andy” and I recently cleaned the house to a deep, molecular level, 

Just exactly like this.

including me doing all my laundry (which is now clean, and in a pile next to the bed looking much like it looked when it was dirty).  It was a deeply satisfying, exhaustive event, but it comes with blow back.  Namely that in my head, the house is now clean.  Clean things don’t need to be cleaned.  That means clutter doesn’t need to be put away, counters don’t need to be wiped down, junk mail does not need to be gone through, the kitty litter box does not need to be scooped—because we’re already there.  

Guess which one is "Andy."

It’s already clean because we cleaned it. 

I imagine you see the flaws in my logic.  

Luckily, this delusion has an end in sight because I am basically trashing the kitchen today making ginger beer and Bad Bread, so don’t worry, the bubble will burst.

How to make Bad Bread:
Find a regular sourdough recipe, and do that,
except with the following ingredients:

- A non-specific quantity of flour

- Whey from kefir instead of water

- Salt

- Peach Bug juice from homemade peach

  ferment which is presumably full of

  yeast so maybe this will work

- Low expectations

It already started to crack when I finally gave in and took out my compost.  I keep a ceramic jar by the sink and put food waste in there, then dump it in the compost pile in the yard.  People have more complicated systems for this but here’s the thing:  We didn’t invent composting.  “Composting” is the name we came up with for the already-occurring, natural process of soil happening.  You can buy a $250 compost bin that has both bells and whistles, but that tool is not the thing that makes compost happen.  It might make it happen faster, and in a very contained space, and maybe your final compost is supposed to smell like roses and attract unicorns, but for no monies you can also just throw your food and yard trimmings in a pile in the yard. 

I don't know if I'm going to
make it, Reader....

Which I finally did today.  It’s an easy chore but is not my favorite—not because it’s smelly (which it can be) and slimy (which it can be) but because I have to walk the full container a daunting 60 feet, all the way from my kitchen counter out the back door to the corner of the yard.  It is amazing what the addition of a walk will do to my perception of a chore’s burden on my day. 

And today, while hurling my load into the pile, I encountered a spider web.  “Oh!” I thought. “How nice, a new friend!”

Then I looked only very slightly to my right, and discovered that my new friend was really very close to me, and she is huge.  I mean the kind of huge that she had a packed lunch up there with her the size of a sparrow.  She’s gorgeous, mind you, I just…wasn’t totally prepared to be so close to something large enough to mug me.  She’s a garden spider, aka writing spider, 

She looks like this, but more menacing.

so she has long spindly legs and bright Rorschach-test yellow and black markings all over her and her web is big enough to catch low flying air traffic. 

I took a deep breath, told myself to calm down, and turned my head only very slightly to the left and discovered there are two of them.  Two webs, two hawk-sized spiders, two new neighbors who probably deserve a welcome basket and maybe a guided tour but I won’t be available for that because I broke the laws of time and space getting back inside.

Captured footage from my brush with
New Neighbors.

I just…I wasn’t ready.

I have a long and storied history with spiders.  When I was a young goblin, living my life exploring the woods behind our house and slogging through the ponds and creeks, I didn’t care about spiders.  I mean, they can look creepy but also they are not interested in me. 

Then one year, I had climbed over the wall onto where they were building a new highway spur behind where we lived (like you do) to muck around in the construction equipment and climb through those big cement pipes and whatever.  I’m walking down through the young trees they have planted all along the hill beside the highway itself to reduce erosion, like I have been doing every weekend since they started building this magnificent playground for me.  

The historical records suggests that
Miss Muffet was, by all accounts,
a complete bad ass who just
startles easily before coffee.

There I am minding my own when I realize there is a garden spider web in front of me, stretched between two of the trees.  The Lady Herself is holding court in the center, right where I’m walking, and I get very close before I realize she is there.  As mentioned above, they are big, and suddenly realizing how close you are to one can be arresting.  Close call, but fine, my heart pounds, I go a different way.  There’s another one.  I readjust again—another one.  I am feeling panicky now because they really are huge and they are all around me and I start to move maybe just a little too fast navigating this complex maze system and then obviously I walk through a web and get a spider the size of my face on my chest, and I lose my mind. 

I bolt—not back up the hill, but to the unfinished, flat, barren expanse of spider free pre-highway, where I stop drop and roll like a person on fire and hyperventilate for a while.  Rather than go back the way I came, I go the long way home which is about three miles but involves no proximity to trees or bushes of any kind. 

When I get home, there is a garden spider web across our front stoop. 

I did not go outside again for years.  This literally ended my outside-goblin days, and began my bookish-nerd phase. 

Well....Goodbye. 

I love you, Caraballo!

Then, in college, I went on a study abroad trip to the Dominican Republic.  It was great, and I kept going back to visit or volunteer for years.  One of those trips, I lived in a small rural community nestled deep in a sugar cane field, about 3 miles from the closest paved road. 

Two important spider-related incidents happened on this trip.  First, my very first morning, I wake up in my new, strange bed in a new, strange house in this tiny remote village, and look outside of my new, strange mosquito net to see not one, but two softball-sized wolf spiders crawling down my bedroom wall.   Just, right there.  I have hated spiders ever since the Summer of Infestation I told you about above, so I am frozen in panic.  They are not remotely frozen, they are casually walking to work or whatever.  Living their creepy, huge, hairy lives.  I look around to assess the rest of the room and my proximity-to-weapons situation.  I look back…and they are both gone.

Sorta.

I think my panic, in this moment, crested me into a transcendent space.  I had so much adrenaline I went calm and crystal clear.  And the thought that rang out in my head was, you cannot find the spiders, you cannot prevent the spiders, and if you remain in panic you are not going to be able to function.  You have months left here; you have to stop it.  I couldn’t get out of bed, get dressed, go to work while holding my fear with both hands, so I had to put it down. 

So I did. 

Not entirely, and about a week later, in the little preschool I was working in, there was another, even bigger wolf spider on the ceiling.  I was visibly unhappy about it, and one of the little kids noticed and thought it was funny.  So he—no kidding—got a rock, knocked poor Wolfie off the ceiling, grabbed her, and chased me in circles with her in his outstretched hand.  

And ooo lordy I ran—until it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop chasing me as long as this was fun.  So stop I did, and while he approached me menacingly, I just took a deep breath and let it happen.  His face fell, he looked confused—and then he looked angry cuz Wolfie got her bearings and bit the crap out of him.   Wolfie died that day, the boy turned into one of my favorite, sweetest kids, but the lesson of “just let the fear go” stuck.  (This does not apply on airplanes, obviously.)

Also this.

Since then, spiders don’t bother me.  I mean there’s a web in our kitchen on the outlet by the sink, doing a brisk business in the fruit flies that are constantly after the compost bin.  She is welcome, she can live there forever.  When I was in Peace Corps, in Madagascar, I was stalking a roach with a flip flop when a giant wolf spider leaped out from behind a stool, pounced on it from behind, ripped its head off and carried its body away in victory.  I immediately went from “goodness that is big and scary” to “GO GIRL I LOVE YOU BRING YOUR FRIENDS.”  We are on the same side. 

So I had thought I made peace with my eight legged friends…riiiiight up until there were two garden spiders within inches of my face.  Perhaps letting my fear go is just a code phrase for repressing childhood trauma, but whatever.  Ima try to live and let live.  I looked it up—they’re not poisonous, they are a sign of a balanced ecosystem, they kindly put zig-zag patterns in their webs so that birds and I will not run into them, and from a bug-management perspective, we’re on the same side. (Mostly.  They will eat mosquitoes and flies but are big enough to eat butterflies and bees and the second there’s a dragon fly in the web I will rip their world apart.)  They could be less close to the thing I walk over to every time I dump my compost, but fine.  My real concern is some sort of spider bloom like the one those many summers ago that consumed the entire world and turned me into an indoor cat…but I looked up their babies and honestly, they’re kinda cute.  Also alllllmost all of them die before they stop being cute.  And worst-case scenario, the internet says a natural spider predator is a monkey, so if things get out of hand I’ll just get me one of those. 

Look at how cute they are!