Spooky season, sort of

As I walked out the door into an elaborate spider web this morning, I reminded myself to be grateful to the spiders. Other people have to buy artificial spiderwebs to decorate their front porches this time of year, but our front porch gets the full Spooky Season treatment at no cost to me, except for the occasional discomfort of a face full of web. 

It's always seemed ironic to me that our road is considered too scary for trick-or-treating. I mean, if you want to experience some genuine fear that doesn't come out of a package, why not walk along a country road with no sidewalks or streetlights and hike a quarter-mile up a dark driveway to a porch swathed in spider webs? The night sounds emanating from the woods aren't chintzy recordings but actual Things that Come Out at Night, and they're watching you. In fact, don't look now but they could be creeping up behind you right now!

Nope, no trick-or-treating on my road, and no one coming inside the house to see the genuinely scary gigantic spider the crawled our across the dining-room floor the other day. No one else was home and I couldn't stomp it without shoes on, so I grabbed a nearby glass and trapped the spider under it and then watched its futile attempts to escape. I enjoyed Spider Under Glass for a good part of the evening until the resident spider-killer came home and made quick work of the menacing beast.

Speaking of menacing beasts, I was walking toward my classroom building the other day when one of my students stopped me: "Don't go in that way! There's a snake on the path!"

"Cool," I said, and hurried up to take a look. Wish I'd had a camera on hand because it was a lovely lithe ribbon with an iridescent belly, no thicker than my little finger and posing no danger to anyone, but the next group of students who came up the path scared it away with their shrieking. These same students will probably pay good money to buy costumes and go to Halloween parties just to celebrate the scariest things in life, but here they had an opportunity for genuine fear at no charge and they did not appreciate it one bit.