Shit and Spiders

Change and me make nasty bedfellows. So when the dominoes lined up, and God whispered in my ear repeatedly, it became clear that it was time for a move away from "life as we knew it". After sweating blood for a few weeks, we managed to get our old house sold. The house where our babies had come home to, had learned to crawl on the drafty hardwoods, and where Brian learned to make bread and eggplant relish. Our house wasn't exactly "on the wrong side of the tracks". It pretty much sat right on the tracks. A neighborhood with a reputation, you might say.

It was tough to move from an affordable house to the outskirts of the big city where the real estate market had already begun to get ridiculous. We viewed a lot of ugly places, and I often made that drive back to Brandon in tears, imagining the six of us landing up in a skunky trailer in the bush, waiting for the rapture.

But then God happened along in the form of my old mama. She called me up and in her squeaky voice told me that her sister, tante Marie and her were in the real estate business, and that tante's cousin had just put her house up for sale in a good little town not that far from the city. I listened politely but didn't think that much about it.

Well, after viewing a shack in a swamp for a whole lot of money, and a crumbling house surrounded on three sides by railroad tracks, a rushing river, and a highway, I figured.... What the heck? So we called up the cousin. She'd gone down to the local hardware store and outfitted herself with an orange "For Sale" sign and some duct tape, which she industriously used to slap that sign to the front door.

Long story short, it had to be a God thing. We could afford the house. The house was solid, it had lots of potential, and it was big enough for all of us. Once Brian pulled up the pink linoleum, the blue carpet, and the spindles out of the wall, the place increasingly felt like our home. He worked hard and long that summer, laying laminate floor (a far cry from our hardwood, but not bad nonetheless), getting our garage built, taping, pasting, and painting. I did my part too, unpacking boxes, keeping the kids happy, painting bedrooms, and in my spare time I watched several hundred Israelite potatoe bugs sojourn from the large Mennonite garden, across the street (where many met their maker) and away to.... ? the Mennonite church? It was all a bit of a mystery to me at the time, but in retrospect I see it for what it was.

A foreshadowing.

Little had I known what August would bring. Unprepared was I for this new land. Milk and honey? sure. We were a stone's throw from the bee capital and from several billion farms. But what I had not anticipated was this bounty's underbelly.

We had moved into the land of shit and spiders.

In August all inhabitants surrender their homes and belongings to the invasion of the spiders. They spin massive webs in every window and across every available surface. They obscure light fixtures. They linger outside my kitchen window and bare their fat bellies, dashing any of my illusions of squatters going hungry. They wait patiently for the Autumn Flies to shit on every inch of the siding, windows, walls and ceilings before they snare them in their webs. After all that defacating, the flies are tired and buzz around slowly, loudly, round and round my head like a cheap horrer film. Eventually they will surrender to their greedy Autumn partner, and do the dead man dance on the web outside my window.

I suppose its true that no good thing comes without its price. Its a great little town. The people are wonderful. The schools are stellar. There's lots of green space, and just a mile out of town is one of the prettiest sights in the world: a grain field. In August its covered in the most beautiful, golden bales. There's a duck pond beside it, and a lazy little creek. There are parks in the town, a fair to attend, and the friendliest grocery store and post office.

But never, ever forget. For one month in Autumn, the town belongs to the shit and the spiders.