The House of Falling Legs

The cabin I am living in requires fortitude. Fortitude and a sharp eye for little crawly things.

For some reason the summer has been unusually buggy. There are mosquitoes in the mountains. I don't remember there being so many mosquitoes in the mountains, but I do remember Al Gore mentioning that previously mosquito-free cities like Nairobi, built at elevation to escape malaria, are experiencing a rise in the mosquito altitude line and getting infestations that they never had before. Perhaps that's happening here, @#*& global warming. But I digress.

The cabin I am living in is the catacomb of choice for every insect within a ten mile radius. Though the doors and windows are always shut, they find their way in regardless, finishing their pilgrimage from great distances to come die on my countertop.

Correction: The countertop is where the gnats come to die.

The moths come to die in hidden places, like underneath my toothpaste.

The crickets come to die in the middle of the floor, where I will step on them in the morning.

How is it that one building can attract so many tiny carcasses? They're everywhere. If I space out and forget to check my cup in the morning, I will inevitably feel something that is decidedly not water but in fact hard and pointy, much like many little legs, against my tongue. My bathroom looks like someone thought to liberate volumes of mounted insects by pulling out the pins and dumping them everywhere. Case in point - I dropped my facecloth by mistake the other night and went to pick it off the floor. No problem, right? A little dust, a little hair... oh. And a large unidentifiable many-legged exoskeleton stuck to the cloth. Nasty.

The spiders flock to my cabin like mourners to a graveyard, gorging themselves, I suppose. They are mostly well-behaved spiders, except for the fact that they A) like to web up the bathtub, even hours after I've showered, and B) find their way into the clothes I drop on the ground. Yes, I have the bad habit of dropping clothes on the ground and forgetting them until the next morning. I do not "do" orderly. It is not such a problem if I remember to shake out my clothes before putting them on.

If I remember...

There's nothing that can jog your memory quite like a fast moving spider inside your sweatshirt early in the morning.

Crouching Spider, Hidden Moth Carcass. The House of Falling Legs.
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