Have a gameplan for spiders in the tub

I leaned over the other day to pick up what I thought was a piece of lint on my carpet, and the lint moved! So did I.

It’s the old spider-in-the-bathtub story, and I have been vigilant about making sure that the spider that was in the bathtub was there for no good reason and needed to be relocated before it shared my space.

Living as a single and being faced with pests (real or metaphorical) that take up residence in your house may just be an inconvenience to some and a study in terror for others. I exaggerate here. I’m not terrified of the spider itself, but I am also not at ease having one live where I do.

I don’t understand why insects with more than two legs always end up in the shower or the tub, but they do. Spiders do good work — they eat other bugs. That’s fine with me as long as they do it outside. So I have developed a foolproof way of returning them to the outside and saving yet another life, as some believe. The spider gets a nice plastic glass over the top and a piece a cardboard underneath and very carefully gets a nonstop trip outside to live another day.

The rest of the black or brown specks that move on the floor usually find their way into a piece of tissue and are dispatched via the toilet. It’s not pretty, but it works for me.

Let’s now look at the spider and form it into a real person. Let’s make the spider into your opposite sex. And, let’s say that this spider/person has brought joy and warmth and security into your life and you wouldn’t mind getting into the same tub together. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t mind taking the spider/person into your bed. Life is good.

Then, on the other hand, there are those who simply cannot stand one minute more of the spider/person and with a great deal of anxiety take the steps necessary to get them out the door.

When singles date, these two spider/person stories are automatically in place. Especially for the older single who has yearned or still yearns for that special one who will come along despite bringing the scariest of futures.

“Will you come into my parlor said the spider to the fly.” Boy, are you in or what?

Some of us just don’t want to deal with either choice. We live an active life. We try to stay safe. We have our realities, goals and rewards in good order. The spider is just a spider.

Now then, that piece of lint that moves warrants an easy fix, and then again, maybe not. There isn’t much we can learn from it except that it has ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time on the carpet and it is easily displaced. It is difficult to draw any conclusions about its innocence or good/bad behavior. I have a difficult time even making an effort to give these creatures an outside trip to freedom.

And maybe that’s why some of us stay single. Although we have made remarkable transitions from husband to widower, from wife to divorcee AND had to deal with the spider issue many times, an insect that was just passing through does not attract our attention in the way a spider does. Just ask one of us.

It would seem to me that the next time you run up against an insect who doesn’t really belong in your life, you’ll know well enough what to do with it.

Mary Ann Linforth is a Green Valley resident and freelance writer. Her column appears Sundays. Contact her at maryann146@aol.com. See her moderate a group discussion on single life at 9:30 a.m. Friday at Casa de Ezperanza, 780 S. Park Centre near the La Posada campus.