Big and Beautiful Bugs

Isaiah found a bug on a window screen.

"It's a moth," he said. "See how the antennae are fern-like?"

I had forgotten that that is a defining characteristic of moths, but I'm glad he remembered.

In a slightly more heart-pounding moment, I was doing dishes last week (left over from the night before) when a large spider appeared from behind a glass.

It was one of the largest spiders I'd seen outside of bug museums. I had had a ghostly glimpse of (what I hope was) the same spider the day before. I had just entered the RV and what looked like a big bug skittered under the fridge. So I wasn't entirely unprepared for this big spider, but still.

Even knowing that it probably wasn't poisonous didn't make me want to pick it up. There's a threshold of what seems feasible and what doesn't, you know?

In the end, I avoided the spider and it avoided me, but it eventually expired. I think it was a nursery web spider, called the cheetah of the spider world because they pounce on their prey rather than make a web to trap their food. That would explain the speedy hiding.

In non-bug news, I think I have fully turned the corner, now at 20 weeks. I went to church and, though I ate almonds through service to keep nausea at bay, I didn't suffer four days of ill effects as I had a month ago. I am gradually trying to work my way through four months of accumulated debris and random papers. I figure if I do an hour or two a day, eventually I will have a clean space. Perhaps that's delusional. And we went to a friends' house on Memorial Day and I had no horizontal time for the whole nine hours, and even did the driving each way.

I did the driving because Phil had taken a nap all morning. I didn't think much about it. He doesn't usually take three or four hour naps, but I figured he was extra tired from late nights of work. He got up about noon and went outside almost immediately. He felt the world spin a bit and put his hand on the chicken plucker. Next thing he knew, he was on the ground, chicken plucker pulled over. He had passed out. So when we left a bit later, I did the driving.

At our friends', Phil grew more and more out of it. "Maybe I ate something," he said, and sure enough ... he had gone to a pot luck the day before without me there to remind him that salad dressings almost always contain MSG. (The pot luck was hosted by a family with similar clean eating to ours, and he was lulled into a false sense of security, forgetting that not all food was provided by the host family.)

Happily, as he spiraled down, he was able to enjoy their bathtub. As I drove home, he filled a gallon Ziploc with the most unbelievable quantity of stomach contents.

That must have been the key: his stomach had saved the poison and kept it from moving through his body. Because rather than the standard three day migraine, he felt a bit woozy, but mostly okay today.

And today the boys and I read for many hours from our beloved Seven Daughters and Seven Sons, one of the best books in the world. Set in the Middle East: an adventure story, a coming of age, a lesson in business, some sweet and less sweet family relations, the world's best romance, all from a story passed down in Iraq for over a thousand years.