Leaves of three, let it be -- right?
I like to sit out on my porch. I can talk to my neighbors, enjoy the (relatively) cool evening air, get much better cellphone reception, and every night this time of year there are all these fireflies that rise slowly up out of the grass and up up up into the treetops starting at dusk.
That's the good part.
The bad part is the poison ivy. And the brown recluse spiders (sorry, no photo yet). Apparently there are poisonous snakes as well, but only the first two come up on to my damn porch.
Labels:
flora and/or fauna,
random photos
2 comments:
Oh, man! I would be sooooo peevish if poison ivy invaded my porch. I would consider it a personal betrayal, a violation even.
The recluse spiders? Well, my spider policy is pretty lax, generally, seeing as how they eat things that eat me (e.g., mosquitoes). I'm okay with them as long as they leave me alone. Brown recluse spiders, as far as I'm aware, only bite when you invade their nice dark spaces (which can include the toes of your shoes). When I lived where they live, there were many, many spiders inside my house by virtue of its warm weather construction, so I got in the habit of banging all my shoes against a wall and using something to swab out the insides before putting them on, not to mention shining a light and actually looking before sticking my ungloved hand anywhere dark. The only problem I ever had with any poisonous spider was when I accidentally sat on a black widow, who bit me on the butt as her (IMO quite reasonable) last act before dying. I got an asthma attack and a giant welt to show for it, but that was it. My neighbor in the same town was bitten by a brown recluse and didn't find out until she had black streaks running up her arm from the infection. Her arm was saved by her immediately panicking upon seeing these streaks, rushing off to the ER, and being pumped full of antibiotics. Not everyone who is bitten develops a life-and-limb-threatening infection, and not everyone who does is as lucky as my neighbor. But the fairly obvious morals of all these stories are (a) careful where you stick your body parts and (b) if you see black streaks start to develop on any part of your body, you know, the kind that don't wash off, don't wait to see what happens; drop everything and run to the doctor.
I don't like to kill spiders at all. The only time I've been up close and personal with a brown recluse was one time I trapped one in my kitchen and didn't recognize it as a brown recluse until I'd taken it outside and released it back into the wild. If I'd been a little quicker to ID that one, I'm not sure if I would have been able to kill her.
I like spiders -- and as you say, they do eat things that are much more annoying.
I grew up where there are no poisonous spiders or snakes, and never developed a healthy fear of either. I need to be more careful, I think.
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