Jul 26, 2019 3 min read

The interlopers have arrived, sneaking in through cracks under doors or blatantly riding in on a dog or flying overhead through an opened door.

Last night, it was a daddy longlegs spider. I almost trampled it while clearing the dinner dishes.

“Spider!” I yelled to the farmer. “Daddy longlegs!”

“They’re friendly,” he said, not moving.

I dropped a piece of junk mail onto it, stepped over the whole thing and went about my business. When I returned to the kitchen a few hours later, the mess had been tossed into the trash. But had the farmer been nearby when the spider first happened by, he would have picked it up and carefully returned it to the side yard.

I don’t like spiders, flies, wasps, cicadas, moths, mice and, of course, snakes.

The farmer, though, sees all of those things not as creepy nuisances but as lovable underdogs. On his farm in Argentina, tarantulas the “size of a fist” would sometimes sneak in and hide in his shoes. Most other people would take to them with a baseball bat, and me, I would hang a for-sale sign and walk away, but the farmer escorted them out of the house with nothing more than a good talking-to. Likewise, when a stray cat came around the hacienda, he built it a tiny house, complete with a carpet floor and window – -and probably put some of his tomatoes and peaches out there to feed it.

That little house was the embodiment of the farmer’s talents and approach to life. He can build anything, grow anything, and is kind – even to the critters the rest of us want to eradicate.

I’ve written some about the things the farmer has built and improved around the house, and those columns often bring emails from readers who say, “You’re lucky to have someone so handy.” And I always write back to say they’re right. While certain attributes are always important in a mate – a sense of humor, neatness, disinclination to complain about my cooking would make the list – some of us hit the jackpot with a partner who has all of that and also the willingness to go on a dead mouse safari when necessary.

It makes me wonder what I bring to the table, and what the farmer would say about that. I would get maybe a C-plus in the cooking and neatness categories but ace the sense of humor part. That’s what I’d say, anyway. He might have a different take, giving me low marks on what he considers my silly aversion to spiders.

We could argue for an hour about what a “sheila” I am when it comes to bugs and rodents, and then I’ll tell him I thought I saw something crawling under the bed and will he please go look for it. On the way, he’ll pass the new bookcase he built, and the place where he removed an extraneous door, and the new chandelier he hung over the dining room table – at the center of which is a bowl of his fresh tomatoes and herbs.

Maybe he’ll come back to say he didn’t see anything crawling under the bed. Or maybe he’ll come back holding a spider in his hands.

“Squash it and flush it a couple of times,” I would say.

… as he walked toward the door to set it free.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.