The Scorpion House
My last Drafty post got me thinking about some of the structures that have been characters in my life, particularly a rental house that took a starring role while we lived in the desert. We called it the Scorpion House. We also lived in the Upstairs Downstairs House and the Window Place, but nothing is seared into our collective family memory quite like the Scorpion House.
After a few years living in a pastoral setting, we had to relocate to the desert. My husband was the advance team member, and went ahead of me and our son, so the task of finding a place to live fell to him.
Having lived in the southwest before there was one must-have item on my list — a neighborhood pool. Our son was young and I was hell bent on getting him outside and into the water so he could learn to swim. I figured if we were in the water, we could be outside in 118 degrees and not live like vampires, huddled inside our air-conditioning until 9pm when the temperatures fell to a chilly 99.
I imagined evenings after work at the pool or early weekend mornings in the summer before the intense heat set in (before sunrise). It was my solace for moving back to a place I never thought I would have to live again.
Just a few days before my son and I joined him, my husband found a place. It was in a decent neighborhood and best of all the pool was fantastic, lots of shade, a waterfall, and since the neighborhood was mostly retirees, extremely quiet. There was even a Starbucks within walking distance.
I was beginning to feel better about leaving my country home and renting a place in the arid, dusty brown city.
I’m a firm believer in looking on the bright side. As human beings, we’re extremely adaptable. I can learn to appreciate my surroundings no matter where I live. I chose to focus on the positives of desert living instead of bemoaning my fate. I wouldn’t have to deal with the bitter winter weather, stores were open 24/7, there was an international airport nearby, and the sun would shine almost every day.
And then there was the starkness of the the desert landscape, which some people immediately fall in love with, the beauty of a rare desert bloom, a gem in the monotony of the scrubby hills and mountains. I am not one of those people, but I hear tell there are out there.
Infestation
We’d been in the house for about a month when the first incident happened. My husband was laying on the floor in our son’s room, putting him to sleep. He had a low to the ground toddler bed so that if he rolled out, he would gently land on the carpet. Silly us, we thought the carpet was a safe place.
From the living room I heard my husband yell out, “Something just bit me!”
I ran into the room and saw him rubbing the back of his calf. “I think it was a spider. My leg is burning!”
I turned on the light and began to scour the floor, hoping to find something, but honestly the spider could have hidden anywhere. Luck was on my side, though, and I found a scorpion hiding under a turned over flip flop. I grabbed a pair of tongs from the kitchen and a glass bowl with a lid. The creature safely contained, we looked at it and it’s tiny little stinger, amazed and horrified.
“Does your leg still hurt?” I asked my husband.
“Not really, below the knee has pretty much gone numb.”
That sounded kind of serious, so I did what any sane American would do, I checked the internet for scorpion identification. I studied at least ten images before determining, in my unqualified opinion, it was not a bark scorpion.
As we learned in the coming days, looking at five images of scorpions online doesn’t quite make you an expert in arachnology. Living with them for two years does (yes the place was so perfect we signed a two year lease).
I won’t go into too much detail about bark scorpions, but they are the most venomous scorpion in North America, they are hard to see, and as you scorpion savvy readers know, bark scorpions can climb walls.
They like to hang out in high places, then suddenly drop to the floor, or treat you to a little visit on your shoulder as you nap on the couch. So friendly! They also proved impossible to get rid of.
We called an exterminator and he did his best to help us. We removed food sources, water sources, hiding places, we sealed cracks, spread the desiccating powder, all to no avail. I quickly learned, as the resident scorpion slayer, that the most effective thing I could do was to have a hammer in every room to smash them with. The clerk at Lowe’s didn’t bat an eye when we said the eight hammers were for scorpion control.
We also bought UV flashlights so we could hunt them at night, we never went barefoot in the house, we never turned all the lights off, we had to remove all bedding from the beds every morning and pray nothing fell on us during the night.
We will never, ever forget the Scorpion House.
We laugh about it now, it’s become a bonding force between us. My son asked the other day, “Mom, remember the time I got trapped in the shower because there was a scorpion on the bath mat? Why was he lounging there in the middle of the day?”
I countered with, “Remember when I grabbed the pan out of the cabinet and threw it across the room because I saw a scorpion hanging from the lid?” Turned out to be an exoskeleton, but still, eww!
I never want to live with those little stingers again, but I have no regrets about our time there. We have some great stories to tell. And once the sting healed, then reappeared, then healed again, and the muscle twitching stopped, and the hallucinations subsided, my husband could predict lightning storms and pork belly futures with his left calf. Win!
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Last week in Drafty — Swank apartment or simple shanty
Next week — Why you should never name your protagonist Gordon
