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Unsolicited Nature

This week I was in the kitchen cooking dinner when I was attacked by ANOTHER Christmas beetle! It crashed into my elbow while I was stirring the chicken pasta. I got such a fright I screamed hysterically and temporarily forgot I was holding a spoon in the pot. On reflex, I thrashed my arm wildly in order to flick the darn thing off. Instead I just succeeded in launching a large piece of saucy chicken into the air – or as Buzz Lightyear prefers to call it, “To infinity and beyond!”  - because though I searched the kitchen carefully, I could not find it anywhere.

In my hunt for the AWOL piece of chicken, I did manage to locate a Rain Spider so hideously large and hairy it looked as though it was sporting a large Chihuahua dog as a scarf. It skulked off and slunk behind the curtain with body language that proclaimed; “Follow me and you’ll lose a limb.” There were also a variety of flippy flying things harassing my kitchen light fixture and a slug leisurely mincing around on my bathroom wall. I’ve been putting it outside every night for the last week, but the next day it is always back inside. Either it’s super-persistent or there’s a small colony of slugs lurking outside my bathroom, eagerly toying with my emotions and mocking me in their little French accents. (As you can see I don’t have children, which enables me to devote entire afternoons to considering significant life-questions such as “What accents do slugs have when they talk to each other?”) It is summer in Africa and the creepy crawlies are out in full force. In my own home I have nature all over me, which is a clear violation of my fundamental human right to be a “City Girl.”

If I wanted to be assaulted by nature, I would have gone camping.

Because camping is where people forgoe the luxury of cell phone reception, electricity, and personal space; and VOLUNTARILY elect to place nothing more than a flimsy piece of material between themselves and “The Great Outdoors” – which, for your information, contains vast quantities of undiluted dirt, and bugs, and mosquitoes, and snakes, and lions, and skinny-dippers, and Rain Spiders so large they routinely snack on smaller animals such as zebras! Call me a Philistine, but I believe camping was created by Satan - right after he invented war, rush hour traffic, P.M.S, and hospital gowns. Don’t get me wrong, I love nature - at least the concept of it - but I don’t like placing myself at the mercy of it.

But to my dismay, camping is slowly invading my home life in the form of unsolicited nature. At this rate, pretty soon I’ll be cooking dinner surrounded by wildlife, with an antelope passing me the salt! And sadly there is little I can do about it because it’s simply too hot to keep the windows closed at night. These creepy crawlies are stressing me out. In a month from now I shall be a mere husk of my former self; overcome by the anxiety of knowing that the herculean Rain Spider can probably survive for months in my home on that elusive piece of chicken.

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