spiders | Life on a Colorado Farm

Last night I dreamed of spiders….lots of spiders.

Crazy big spiders, tiny tiny spiders, spiders of all shapes and sizes; spinning webs here and there and everywhere.

Spiders creep me out. I know! I know! They are an important part of the ecosystem.

But once when I was a young child my mother was bitten by a Black Widow Spider and almost died. It was a long, slow time of recovery for her—and I never forgot it.

Then several years back I was bitten by a cousin of the Brown Recluse spider, which resulted in a hole on my forearm.

I dream that I had to walk through their webs, while the spiders were spinning, climbing, hunting and even snacking on their victims.

I remember going to a drive-in movie show with my parents where the two features were THE SPIDER and the second one The Fly

I spent the whole time crouched on the floor in the back of the car.

It was a long night.

I’m so glad it’s morning and I left behind those thousands of eyes, round as marbles, in their sticky paths of silk hanging in the air….watching.

Whew!

I guess I was just way too tired when I went to sleep.

Your friend on a western Colorado farm,

Linda

Just like all of you everywhere, we have insects…big ones, little ones, ones who stink, ones who just crawl on you and make your fur have icky feelings, some which bite…like spiders and some with stingers!

Where we live we don’t have scorpions, although they do have them in Peach Valley and I saw one once. They sure are pretty creepy to look at….that tail thing that swings up, up, up….just as I was about to give it a good sniff Mom got there and pulled me away. She tried to stamp on it but it scuttled real fast under a log.

For shear creepiness there are centipedes ….Boomer found a couple of those under a log in the canyon. He even yelped and ran off a tad then barked at the log, making Mom think he got stung, but he didn’t he was just was letting Mom know some creepy critter was under the log.

There are some HUGE centipedes in the canyons around us, Mom says, but Boom and I haven’t seen any.

Which is real good!

There are black widow spiders and brown recluses here also. A friend of ours, died from a brown recluse bite. She was a real beauty of a German Shepard. We still miss her.

There are the honey bees, of course, they have stingers. But they pretty much leave Boomer and I alone, we aren’t sweet enough for their tastes.

But the ones I don’t like are the Yellow Jacket Wasps. I snap at them if they get too close to me and my sleeping spots…my dog house, for example.

Boomer usually just tucks tail and tries to run away from them.

Now Yellow jacket Wasps really like houses, they set up their house anywhere they can along the eves of our main house. Mom is really steady about keeping them off eves and out of any holes and cracks she can find. Sometimes those angry bugs even try to make a home in the ends of the pipe holding up the clothes lines…they don’t last long there either.

For the first part of summer and the second part of summer those yellow striped winged stinger bugs pretty much mind their own business. But come AUGUST they change. They start getting pretty darn serious about figuring out where they want to spend the winter and they get MEAN about it.

This means — THEY STING!!

Mom sometimes put vinegar on our noses (or other places) or a paste of baking soda and water, but if I snap at one and I get stung in the mouth…well, there doesn’t seem to be much Mom can do for me.

Yellow jacket wasps are everywhere right now. Mainly because they have to hurry as fall is coming on and coming on fast. I don’t care if the calendar says it is still the third week in August and the heat is supposed to be sitting heavy on the land, the land itself is saying it’s fall…late September early October…somehow we missed August.

Maybe we had July and August all at once…it sure was hot enough for such a thing to happen in July.

Mom took the following photo yesterday so you can see how much fall is on the land.

LOTS!