This led to the loudest series of shrieks that our neighbors have probably heard in a long time! It was so gross that I completely lost my appetite for a midnight snack and had that creepy spiders-crawling-up-my-back feeling all night long. Every tickle of a hair set us freaking out and doing a little spasm-dance. I brushed up against something in my kitchen and instantly fell into a hyperventilating ball on the kitchen floor. Sometimes I just can't control my arachnophobia.
The thing is, I actually don't mind bugs too much. If I'm conscious of their presence before they can sneak up on me, I really enjoy them. I've worked very hard to come to terms with spiders; I can pick up Daddy-Long-Legs without so much as a wince. I never kill spiders, or any bugs for that matter, and bring them outside to roam free. But when those yucky, fat-legged spiders chance inches from my face I can lose it very quickly.
On another side, that only goes for bugs and spiders indoors. I could care less what creepy crawlers were out in nature where they belong. It's only because humans live in homes that they insist upon keeping meticulously clean, that an 8-legged surprise visitor can cause such mayhem and fear. Which leads me to my next point: Homes and their cleanliness.
We build houses because we need shelter, obviously. But our "civilized" way of living has turned us around so that we spend more time indoors than out. I'm pretty sure that caves and simple grass-huts weren't inhabited for 20 hours a day. Food was prepared on an open fire, outdoors, children played and hunted and worked outdoors, women sat under cloth awnings, perhaps, to finish their basket weaving and pottery, but before the discovery or invention of electricity, people spent as much time in the natural day light as they could. Why would they be in their dark homes- except perhaps to nap or to cool off from the hot sun, or to escape from a sudden threat, I don't see a reason. We sleep, cook, eat, clean, work, even travel indoors. If it we're not under the concrete roof of a house, then we're in a car, plane, bus, train, grocery store, school building, elevator, whatever. But the time we spend outdoors is so little compared to what it used to be. I see this as a bit pathological. We're obsessed with our indoor haven of cleanliness and perfection. But nature doesn't work that way. We don't work that way. And so house-work becomes a chore, we become slaves of our own obsession.
Dust is pretty much just dead skin. We lose skin, we lose hairs, we drop crumbs, dirt blows through our windows, it just accumulates, there's no way around it. But isn't it funny how the outdoors doesn't seem too dusty (unless one lives in the desert, of course.) We don't notice the hairs that we lose forming into evil dust-bunnies and sitting in the garden. No, they just blow away and become part of the earth again. Nature has a way of dealing with it. But concrete doesn't compost hair or dust. It collects it, until we deal with it.
When I was wwoofing in Sweden, our barn/cafe/home was quite open to the forces. The wind could blow through pretty much every "building" and made our habitat feel very one-with-nature. Yes, we had some closed doors, and behind those doors was dirt and dust. Yes, the kitchen and barn had to be swept and cleaned, but it honestly didn't feel as much work as cleaning my own family's house.
So after the spider incident, we spent the next day cleaning and cleaning until the sun set. What a fun day. We moved my sister's bed and all her furniture and went in with an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner and sucked up the nastiness behind and under her bed. She found and killed the not-so-itsy-bitsy-spider. It made me sad when she did that. She could have let it go just as easily.
Anyway, now our space is "clean," but wait a few days and the dust will have built castles again.
I can't wait for that back-to-nature feeling of wwoofing, where the dirt and dust doesn't even make itself noticed. Where showers are occasional and work is gratifying. Where we are slaves to the land, and happily so, and not to our strange way of trying to civilize dirt.
PS. After cleaning, those flowers I picked with my sister seemed so out of place. They definitely belong in a dusty, soil-water-air filled place. Actually just outside. But I got a funny photo of one of the flower buds, closed to the setting sun behind my window. Clearly a penis-flower. Phallic home deco. Cool.
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