I live in Georgia, where the spiders and bugs are the size of dinosaurs. Since we don’t have enough freezing temperatures, I think they just keep growing and multiplying. I assume some of the hardier spiders are older than I am at this point. Tolkien based the character of Shelob on the wolf spider living in my garage. True story.
One particularly weird-looking bug is the stink bug, which resembles an army tank with legs. Supposedly they smell when you squish them, so I tend to leave them alone. The other night one of them buzzed noisily around my room banging into things while I was trying to sleep. It was insanely loud, but I shoved earplugs in my ears and eventually fell asleep, hoping it wouldn’t die midair and fall on me in the middle of the night.
I woke up the next morning relieved to find no trace of the bug. I performed my usual 6am routine, shuffling from room to room making sure the kids were up and moving. I grabbed the apple off my nightstand, called for the dogs, and headed downstairs to let them out and make coffee.
I hate the early school day mornings, but every day there’s a fifteen minute window that I live for. After feeding the dogs, making sure the kids’ backpacks are ready with water bottles and snacks, setting out the various prescriptions my people take before school, and pouring the coffee, I sit down with my word puzzle and breakfast for fifteen glorious minutes before the kids tromp downstairs and I race around getting their breakfasts and shooing the kids out the door to the bus stop.
On this particular morning, I sipped my coffee, moved the letters of my game around, and took a bite of apple. Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention and my gaze shifted from the letters of the game to the apple in my mouth, and going cross-eyed, I saw the stink bug materialize from the center of the apple and start crawling toward my face. READ MORE
