Something you may not know about me: I don’t kill bugs. Pretty much ever. I do make exceptions for flies and mosquitoes and anything that — God forbid — is or might be in my foodstuffs, but otherwise the creepy-crawlies are safe with me. Any unwanted guests of the many-legged variety are carefully captured and released outside. Even bees and wasps and spiders.
Especially spiders. For the first, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I hold them in pretty high regard. Maybe it’s down to Charlotte. (Terrific!) Second, when I was very, very young I read in Huck Finn that killing spiders is bad luck, and that stuck with me. The only time I ever kill a spider is if it’s already mortally wounded when I happen upon it. To save an able-bodied spider, I’ll actually go to fairly great lengths.
Among my family all of this is fairly well known, as is the fact that if they feel compelled to kill some little creature they discover, they’d better do it without my hearing about it. It was pretty gratifying, then, when Petra came in the office the other day complaining about a bug on her toy stove, asking Olof, “Can you come take it away and put it outside?” instead of insisting that he kill it. And it was even better when he did take it outside. It’s the small victories, I tell you.
That’s the girl!
Girl,
You would never make it in the south!! We have scorpions, black widows and ticks in mass quantities here. However the great big garden spiders are cool to watch them weave their webs all over the place and catch bugs.
The small victories indeed!
Me and Si and Roo don’t kill anything either. When I lived in the south, even worse (to me) than the above mentioned crawlies, were the freakin’ cockroaches! I have this totally unreasonable, unnatural fear of roaches. Especially the big outside ones. I would rather be chased by a man with a chainsaw in a hockey mask. In unfamiliar woods. Wearing high heels. Still, even after way too many years of living down there, I walked away with only having killed one roach. And he left me no choice. And I had to do it with my bare hand. Apparently the neighbors four doors down heard my screams, lol.
Come to think of it, I guess I don’t kill bugs either. I do however, when I see them, (thankfully not recently) wage war on roaches. They aren’t bugs though…they are the devil! 😉 *shiver* That’s one of the things I loved about Sweden, rarely any bugs.
Ha! Deb, you crack me up! 😀