Portrait of a Knight in Armor.

~*~Tomorrow, the Chief and I will have been married 23 years. He loves when I post blog entries. This post is dedicated to him. He has put more happy in my ever after than my best dreams ever conjured.~*~


I had put in a long day.
That's my excuse. I need one, and that's the best I can do.

But the Chief and I were in our bedroom, doing what we normally do when he gets home from work. Debriefing, you could call it... He tells me what he learned that day and what all his day consisted of, and I tell him what I learned, and what I did.

It's how we merge when we've been navigating separate highways.

His day is usually more interesting than mine. And he's better at telling it, and I love a good story, so this is probably my favorite part of the day, followed closely by the part of the day where the coffee maker just quit dripping enough that I can pour myself a cup of coffee before another drip drips, and the part of the day where I am pulling back the sheets at night and getting ready to slide between them.

(Diagram that sentence.)

Anyway, I was telling him about my day. He had already told me about his, and I was suddenly frozen by a thought.

"Honey..." I said. And I could not help it, tears just bled through my eyes like water seeping through a basement wall, brimming at the threshold, but not overflowing. "There is a huge spider on the wall behind the freezer. It's the biggest spider I ever saw."

"Bigger than that other biggest spider?" he asked.

"Well, almost as big." I said. "Maybe not quite as big around, but his legs are thicker and furrier, and his body is bigger. He is just gigantic."

"I see." he said soberly.

"Well... I can't go out to my shed now." The Chief was not grasping the magnitude of this. "And I have all these blueberries sitting in boxes that I need to put in the freezer. And I need to go through my freezer and organize it before there's room to put them, because the freezer's smack full."

The enormity of the situation was dawning on me even as I spoke.

I had handled the situation stoically at the time. I had opened my shed door. Taken one step in. Seen the spider. Taken one step out. Shut the shed door.

I didn't so much as shudder till I got back to the wig-wam. That's the truth.

At the wig-wam I had pondered phobias. "They can't rule you if you don't let them." I thought to myself. "I will not think about it. That's all." And I didn't much. In spite of all the blueberries stacked there, needing to be put in the freezer.

But that was half a day ago. I had been strong too long, and felt powerless to even resist. I started to cry. This is called post-traumatic stress disorder, I think. Definitely a disorder of some variety.

"There are probably gobs of them!" I continued, "I saw the skeleton of another huge one hanging out there a long time ago. They're probably out there multiplying and multiplying."

The Chief regarded me thoughtfully. "Sooo...Do I need to get one of those foggers?" he asked.

"Yes!" I hadn't been able to think of a single solution the entire time I hadn't been thinking about it!

The only thing I could think of was that it was going to be impossible to kill him, because, of course, he wasn't going to be sitting there at the same place on the wall  behind the freezer waiting patiently for the Chief to get there to kill him. These are not the kinds of spiders who build webs and stay in them. These are the ambushing kind.

He would just be out there. Forever. Him and his descendants. The Spiders of Gath. And I could no more  go out to my shed without facing the giants. I had hardly considered that there might be a solution!

Hope shown through my tears.  

"Yes!! A heavy duty fogger!" I said.
And then I had to cry some more, out of sheer relief...and to wash all the emotion out in order to get back to normal. You know.

The Chief regarded me some more, smiling a little. A gentle, amused smile.

And then he put back his head and laughed. And roared. He held his stomach and leaned back and just died laughing. He staggered a little...and laughed some more. He may have cried some tears of his own variety.

I knew it would come to that. At some point it would come to that. Because I know him. And he knows me. And that's just how it is.

:)