It was a recent cool, dark morning as I walked onto my middle school campus.  I had no idea what danger awaited me just outside the door of Room 13 as I innocently approached the classroom.  The campus was quiet, and when I am not too tired I enjoy the chance to get to campus early to work undisturbed in my room. 

My wife and two kids were still at home asleep when the incident occurred.  Just outside the base of my classroom door, suspended in mid-air, was a gigantic black widow spider.  I knew that she lived in the little hole between the student lockers and the block wall of the classroom building (I had seen her web) but I had not been to school early enough to run into her.

These little ladies can be dangerous.  I didn’t like the idea of a black widow spider so close to the students and their lockers and frankly I was tired of the widow mucking up my door with its messy webs.  I had gone so far as to stuff construction paper into the hole to try to block the spider’s access to us all.  No luck.

It was time for a showdown.  Six in the morning and dark.  No one else around.  It was either her or me.  Slowly I removed my shoe, raised it high above my head, bent at the knees like someone about to hike a football, and came down on the  intruder in a lightning flash of power.  That’s when it happened. [Read more…]