The Crawlspace
There is a spider the size of my head in the crawlspace beneath the living room, and there is no one besides me to fight him for the Christmas ornaments. So Toddy and Jacob help me suit up before I embark on my mission.
I am fully prepared for battle in my biggest hoodie, two pairs of jeans, fishing waders, a pair of plastic armor chest plates (front and back), Toddy’s ice-hockey goalie mask, a denim jacket, and a colander. The colander is a bit loose, so we attached it with duct tape — only little pieces, please, in case the spider finds a way underneath and I have to rip it off. Every time I swipe at it with my leather work gloves, I hear one of the pieces of duct tape popping free. That’s what I get for going cheap and not buying the real thing.
I’m sweating now. It may be abject terror. Or it may be the fact that it is sometime in June? Either way, drenched. Those jeans will be fun to get off again later. If the spider doesn’t eat me.
Toddy and Jacob are armed with brooms and a laundry basket in case it gets past me, and Toddy hands me my snow shovel and salutes, banging his hand off his football helmet.
“Troops all present and accounted for, Sir!”
I square off my shoulders and shudder involuntarily.
“Hold the line, boys, I’m going in!”
Jacob giggles.
I clamber stiffly up on to the workbench where my father used to make impressive piles of sawdust and not much else, and push the snow shovel ahead of me into the crawlspace.
“Flashlight!” I command. Jacob scoots up and beans me with it while he tries to hand it to me. Jacob is four and a little discombobulated, but grinning his head off.
I turn the flashlight on and hang it on the little hook my dad used to use for the very same purpose, pointing the light into the darkness beneath the living room floor.
“Target acquired!” I call out.
“You see the spider?” Toddy asks. His eight year old voice is a trembling wire of barely contained excitement.
“No, the ornament box. Enemy unaccounted for.”
“Be careful, Sir!” He shouts.
I don’t have the heart to tell him I’m a Ma’am, partly because we’re having fun conquering my terror of things with three-or-more-times as many legs as me, and partly because it will lead to a 27-round dissertation on the subject of female body parts which I am, at this particular moment, completely unprepared for. Toddy finds the word “boobs” almost as amusing as the color of my face whenever he mentions it.
I struggle up on to the ledge and push the snow shovel forward. The idea is to maneuver the snow shovel as far under the box as I can and then coax the whole thing back out again in slow motion.
Whoever came up with this whole “crawlspace” idea wasn’t thinking very clearly. It’s a space that is too small to stand up in and too dark to see in, so of course we fill it full of boxes and gear that we don’t want to trip over on a daily basis. To keep out the inevitable shoe-sized, furry, or segmented interlopers.
So when this box got shoved too far back in the crawlspace for me to get to in the cold, dark depths of December, I said “You know what? We have enough ornaments!” And then I forgot about it.
My boys didn’t. They remember everything. After months of nagging, they finally made me come down here to get back that last box. Because apparently it has all the Christmas Magic in it? It’s not as if the tree was naked! But, they won. That was last week.
It was not a successful mission.
I found a many-legged alien living in the basement. He said the box was his, and I couldn’t have it. It sounded good to me.
I went back upstairs, made popcorn, and we all watched MIB. I told them it was research for a properly planned mission. And they have been helping me plan it with a full-on cerebral assault every day since.
So, now, here I am, pushing the shovel ahead of me into the shadow cast by my inconvenient presence in front of the flashlight beam, trying desperately to think of an alternative method for retrieving this damn box, just in case my giant pancake flipper method doesn’t pan out (lasso? giant fishing net? suction cups and string? harpoons? yet another use for duct tape??).
Creeping inside a black, coffin-height tunnel is … unnerving.
I really wish I had a headlamp. Maybe three. And a spotlight. Maybe I could just drag the sun down here? There’s plenty of it outside.
“You’re not moving, soldier!” Toddy pokes my foot with his broom. Really. I drag myself awkwardly forward until I touch the box with the shovel.
“First objective achieved!” I call back to the boys, who have a clear view of my waders.
“Prepare Tools!” Toddy hollers back.
“Get the shovel ready, Mom!” Yells Jacob.
I line it up under the edge of the box.
“Tools prepared!” I shout.
“Begin acquisition!” Toddy orders.
“Get that box, Mom!” Jacob hollers.
I push the shovel under. The box moves away from me. I swallow my screams of panic and get the box wedged up against a support post and manage to wiggle the shovel underneath it. Concrete-scraping-metal sounds echo back to the boys. I secure the shovel under the box and start to lift and tilt and back up. Now I just have to get out of here…
“Second objective achieved!” I holler, “Moving out!”
“Woohoo!”
“Go, Mom!”
A shadow the size of a giant vampire bat crosses the light in my field of vision. I can only think of one thing:
“EEK!” I scream. “ENEMY BEHIND ME! ENEMY BEHIND ME!”
“Back up, soldier! Bring home that box! Don’t quit now!”
I said it’s BEHIND ME! Giant carnivores are after me, and that boy wants the ornaments! And then, my entire future rolls over me: my sons are in charge. If I don’t bring this box out now, they will just make me come back here over and over again for the rest of my life.
Me and the shovel have a screeching argument about who exactly is carrying this box while I flail around in a state of bug-induced panic. Suddenly, the light is clear and the boys are hollering and I can hear them running around and shouting.
“Get it!”
“That way!”
There is a sound of broomsticks clattering off of everything, possibly including the football helmets. Good thing they’re armored!
“Use the basket!”
“AAAAAHHHH!” Shrieks of horror and a plastic thump.
“WE GOT HIM, MOM!”
“Whoa! What is it?”
“Eeewwww! Look at him!”
I somehow scoot myself, the box, and the snow shovel back down off the ledge and on to the workbench. The boys are excitedly circling the overturned laundry basket and peering between the plastic weave. I am too terrified to look.
“Mommy! You have to see this!” I bite my tongue.
“MOM! IT’S SO COOL!”
“Hold on! I’m still catching my breath from my mission.” I have to avoid letting my terror be their guide. If I keep saying it, it will work, right? Right??
“What IS it?!?” Jacob is asking. Toddy is enraptured, “I don’t know,” he keeps saying, “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s a spider!”
Not a spider?!? What the hell else could be as big as my head and living in my basement without benefit of fur?? Giant mutant beetles? I feel my eyes go glossy and wide and try to blink them back into their proper proportions, but they refuse to close simultaneously, and when I swallow it makes horrible clicking noises in my throat.
“Not a spider?” I finally squeak.
“No, it’s kind of weird-looking.”
We’ll need some light on the subject, I think. Gross.
I climb back up to retrieve the flashlight from its hook and find myself staring into the eight eyes of a spectator with a matching number of arms. I can’t help but screech.
“SPIDER!”
It raises its front arms at me and waves. God help us, it knows its name.
“No, Mom, really, it’s not — ”
“WAUGH!” I point the flashlight beam at the giant arachnid and it scuttles away into the darkness of the crawlspace. I swear I can hear its feet clicking on the concrete as it slowly disappears. It was just lurking there… mocking me…
“Whew. Glad these light sabers work.” I mutter. Jacob giggles.
“Come see, Mommy!”
Toddy looks me dead in the eye. “Nice shootin’, Tex.” Watching Westerns with Grandpa again, I see.
“Thanks, Pardner.” It’s still in the crawlspace. The spider. It’s probably laying eggs. Why did I think of THAT? Crap! Deep breath. Deep breath. It’s a BOY spider. I insist. It has to be! I’ll need to MOVE if it isn’t!
“Look at this thing!” They’re shaking like puppies, my boys. They’re so excited. Not a spider, they said. I brace myself and look under the laundry basket…
Several hours later we are ensconced in the kitchen with a plate of spur-of-the-moment Christmas (in June) cookies and (shudder!) an old aquarium with Fred the Cave Cricket in it. Once they named him, the conversation was over. Right now the top is being held down with bricks. Lots of bricks.
While the boys have mouths full of gingerbread heads, I am silently cheering.
Three cheers for the internet for visual confirmation. Only, NOT, because that means there are more of them in the world. A LOT MORE. I need more cookies.
Three cheers for Edna, the reference librarian in town for knowing everything in the world and being shocked by absolutely none of it. I know she was laughing at me.
And three cheers for Mike the Exterminator, who knew exactly what I was talking about when I called him during my fit of after-encounter squeaking hysteria, and who will be here on Tuesday.
