For some reason, my house seems to be a breeding ground for spiders lately. I swear I’ve seen every species created, minus a tarantula. But even one of those just might pop out of one of my kitchen cabinets at any moment because with my luck, it hitched a ride home in my bag of bananas from the supermarket.
My friend in Texas isn’t much help. For some reason, he enjoys telling me horror stories about the killer bees in his state. And with every story, the bees get bigger and meaner.
“All you have to do is look at one of them the wrong way,” he says, “and it will attack you. Even worse, it will send out a signal to the rest of its buddies and they will come swarming in like mutual aid. And believe me, they won’t stop attacking until you’re down for the count! Those suckers are vicious…like pitbulls with wings!”
I wouldn’t surprise me if the next time I hear from him he tells me that a swarm of killer bees flew off carrying a school bus.
I guess I’m lucky to live in a state that’s so cold, even if the killer bees were given complimentary first-class tickets to come here, they’d refuse. Still, a few incidents in the past have led me to suspect that some of their distant relatives might be hiding out here in the state and are secretly forming armies.
One weekend, for example, my husband and I were riding down Route 28 when he suddenly pulled the car over to the side of the road, slammed the gearshift into park and jumped out. Then, in the middle of the road, he proceeded to do an impressive imitation of Michael Flatley in Riverdance.
“Honey, I really appreciate the entertainment,” I called out to him. “But I think you’re about to get run over by a truck!”
“Something’s down the back of my shirt biting me!” he shouted as the truck swerved around him.
I climbed out of the car, yanked him over to the side of the road, and untucked his shirt. When I shook it, a yellow jacket flew out. Unfortunately, it left its calling card behind – two big red welts on my husband’s back. That was when we discovered his body didn’t react well to stings.
I ended driving him to urgent care.
Thus, on that day, another spheksophobe was born.
I’ll also never forget the night we were sitting in the living room when a huge shadow suddenly moved across the wall. It was a hornet…the biggest and meanest-looking hornet I had ever seen…the Hulk Hogan of hornets.
My husband and I both froze. “Go get the fly swatter,” he whispered to me, not even moving his lips.
“You’re closer to the kitchen than I am,” I whispered back. “Why don’t YOU go get it?”
“Because I got stung the last time and you saw what happened to me. It’s not something I’m eager to repeat.”
We both sat there, our eyes following the hornet until it came to rest on a ceiling beam too high for either of us to reach with anything shorter than a broom.
“He’s landed,” my husband said. “Now’s your chance. Go get the fly swatter.”
“But I’ll have to stand on a chair to reach it with a fly swatter,” I protested.
“Then you'd better get a chair, too, while you’re out in the kitchen,” he said.
Slowly, one measured step at a time, my eyes fixed on the hornet, I inched my
way out to the kitchen and grabbed the fly swatter.
“Don’t we have any wasp spray?” my husband called out to me.
“Yeah, but it’s only for outdoor use,” I answered.
“So? The hornet won’t know the difference!”
“No, but WE will when the fumes turn our lungs into raisins!”
I crept back into the living room and handed the swatter to my husband.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he asked.
By then, I could have given him a few creative suggestions, but I held my tongue. “Kill the hornet!” I said. “You’re taller than I am.”
Sighing, he stood and muttered something about how if he got stung and turned into the color and shape of a tomato, it would be all my fault. He then waved the fly swatter in the general direction of the beam on which the hornet still was perched. Within seconds, the winged assassin swooped down toward us. My husband ducked and started to run as I stood screaming, “Nooo! Don’t run! Kill it!”
Suddenly my husband stopped, turned around and, grasping the fly swatter as if it were a baseball bat, took his best Joe DiMaggio swing at the hornet. I heard a “whap” and then a “ping.”
“I got him!” my husband cheered. “A home run!”
I, however, wasn’t quite yet ready to celebrate. “I won’t relax until you show me the body,” I said.
We searched the room for evidence for the next 20 minutes and found nothing.
“Maybe you just stunned him,” I said. “And when he wakes up, he’s going to be one mighty ticked-off hornet, out for revenge. Why did you hit him in mid-air anyway? Why didn’t you wait until he landed on something again?”
“Believe me, he’s dead,” my husband said. “I hit him so hard, it was like a bug hitting a windshield.”
“Then we should have heard a ‘splat’!” I pointed out.
Unconcerned, my husband decided to go to bed. I, on the other hand, could not even begin to think about sleeping while there still was the remote possibility a revenge-crazed hornet was on the loose somewhere in the house and currently was plotting fiendish ways in which to torture us.
So I searched the Internet for information about how to knock down a wasp in mid-air without using bug spray. Several people claimed hairspray worked on all flying insects because it gunked up their wings and caused them to plummet to the ground or floor, where they then easily could be stomped into oblivion.
I would have armed myself with a can of hairspray at that very moment, but alas, I hadn’t purchased or used hairspray since the 1960s – the era of the popular beehive hairstyle.
How ironic…
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