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Daddy Long Leg stow away
Friday, September 15 2006
This afternoon I had another housecall in Tivoli, and, once I'd crossed the mighty Hudson Fjord, the drive there was through a downpour. On the way back the rain had stopped and I watched the landscape flow forward beneath me as I rode the slope up the east side of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge (which looms low on the list of Al Qaeda targets). As I crossed it, I actively pondered my new theory that the Hudson River divides New England from the Mid West. Gretchen used to live in Milwaukee and she thinks the streets of Kingston look very similar to those she remembers there. But no one would ever mistake Rhinebeck for Milwaukee. It has a decidedly Connecticut look to it.
On the last leg of the drive home, my Honda Hatchback was again impaled by a sixteen foot piece of treated lumber, this one a two by six that will support the top part of additional solar collectors installed on my new solar deck annex. I'm so experienced now with transporting such oversized pieces that this time I was able to do using only a single piece of rope (for the front end) and an electrical extension cord (to secure the back end and keep the hatch from being completely open).
A Daddy Long Legs (aka Harvestman) crawled over me during most of my drive home. These arachnids are common at our place and they often venture inside the house and cars through open doors and windows. I feared this particular Daddy Long Leg might have blown out the window into the decidedly Daddy-Long-Leg-hostile environment between Lowes and the Hudson Valley Mall. I relate to little creatures like these and have real empathy for them, even if it makes no sense because they're, let's face it, basically reproducing bio-robots. Back when I was painting the garage, I swept spiders and insects away before I painted over their habitats (and was delighted by how quickly they moved back in once the paint was dry). So I was understandably delighted on the way home when that Daddy Long Legs reappeared and began walking across my face once more. This tickled and itched, feelings all my ancestors back to the amphibians understood as urgent messages to scratch away a potential parasite. But I did not. Only when I was pulling into the driveway, blocked by the UPS truck, did the Daddy Long Leg finally get whisked away, but it wasn't by me. The brown-uniformed UPS guy got out of his truck and handed me a package through my driver's window, automatically brushing the Daddy Long Legs away in the process. It was grooming reflex at least as old as the primates. He didn't automatically kill it, happily, but relocated the little guy to the forested southwest side of Dug Hill Road.
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