Coffee Time with Elizabeth

This is the part of our show where we sit back and shoot the breeze as if we were sitting together at Starbucks drinking triple grande lattes which I very much wish I was doing instead of sitting here thinking about spiders. 


"It's said," I say sighing away a scalding hot sip of coffee, "that people are either afraid of spiders or snakes. They say it’s a fear of either too many legs or not enough. But not me. I'm afraid of things that move too fast. A spider is fine as long as he's sitting still. But if that cat can book it fast enough to end up on my personal flesh before I know it. Nogat! …and by "cat", of course I mean spider. But in a beatnik sort of way…

"When we went out to Samban, the missionary we were staying with was in a bush house FULL of spiders. Bigger than my hand spiders. She didn't mind. She wasn't afraid of spiders and spiders ate mosquitos so they had a nice symbiotic relationship. They might have even shared a cup of coffee once or twice, much like we're doing now! …though probably a little different since the spiders probably didn't get their own cup and only sipped out of hers after it was long ago set down.

"But my team mates didn't care for the circumstance. Nogat. I? I didn't mind so much. I was just careful not to lean up against them and they didn't really move at all. What really bothered me in Samban was all the little flying things that ended up on my personal flesh. 'IT'S MINE, YOU MONSTERS!' The mosquito net was my safe haven and I vowed to have a king size bed in the bush and I stand by that to this day.

"But there are these little spiders in my house that scurry. And jump. Nope, nogat, no, I am done. Jacob, kill it.

"I have a rule with spiders. It's the punctuation rule. If they're smaller than a punctuation mark, I can kill it. Otherwise, Jacob needs to take it to the cleaners. And by that, of course, I mean… Well, I don't really know where that phrase comes from… Perhaps the mafia and bloodstains in clothing? But you know what I mean… Killing spiders bigger than punctuation can get messy…

"But things that move too fast… Cockroaches are a fearsome example of this. And again, when they're still, I'm ok. Like one time in Angunna. There was a little itty bitty cockroach on a cup (trying to share coffee with me like we have that sort of relationship! How about no!) So I calmly tell Jacob that he needs to kill it. He reaches out to kill it… AND IT JUMPS ONTO HIS HAND AND STARTS RUNNING AROUND HIS HAND LIKE HES ABOUT TO CONJURE A TORNADO OF COCKROACHES! I, of course, freak out. The missionary we're staying with raises her eyebrows at me. The shame. But no. Too fast.

"Another time in the same village, I was opening a long forgotten box when something leaps out of it like the devil is chasing him. I, of course, cry out, before I realize it was just a cute little mouse. Mice, I think, move in a reasonable speed appropriate to their species. All the national children laughed at me because I was afraid of a mouse. So I explained. Sort of… See, I wanted to say "I wasn't afraid of the mouse, I was just startled." But my Tok Pisin wasn't developed enough for such subtle nuances. Instead I said, "I'm not afraid of a mouse. I'm just afraid, that's all." Smooooooth…

"OH! I almost forgot! So one time, we were in our village living portion of POC in Wasabamal. We had a little outhouse down the hill from our house with a thatched roof that seemed to one spider to be a pleasant abode. This spider was 3 to 4 inches in diameter, so leg tip to leg tip. …do spiders have feet? Foot to foot? To foot to foot to foot to foot to foot to foot? If you write foot down eight times, especially with "to"s in between, it starts to look funny. Not that I would know that since, of course, we're talking over coffee and there is neither writing nor reading taking place here.

"Anyway, I wanted this spider dead. But Jacob decided that this spider was too big to kill with his hand. I'm not sure what his rule is… So he took a machete out to the outhouse.
"AND MISSED!

"THREE TIMES, my friend, THREE TIMES, I alerted him to the presence of this herculean spider and he went to vanquish it and it eluded him. So I told my friend in the village this story and she is just cracking up! Mostly because, in her eyes, it's just a tiny spider and Jacob has deemed it necessary to go after it with a bush knife.

"Peppermint is supposed to deter spiders, but I'm not really sure how to aerate my house with peppermint. And I'm also afraid of locking them in with me. Like if I put down a perimeter of peppermint, what if the spiders already in can't get out so they just lay their little baby spiders in my house and then I have a personal torture chamber of my own devise. Nogat!

"And ants, we have a problem with ants. They're everywhere and every kind. We have ants that like water, and ants that like children's Tylenol, and ants that like sweet things, and ants that like salty things, and biting ants that occasionally infiltrate our house with no apparent objective. When I was young my mother sprinkled powdered cinnamon on the threshold to keep the ants out. I know, it sounds like some crazy old wives tale but apparently they take issue with walking through powder and, whenever we found the in the house again, we'd glance at the threshold and, sure enough, by the wind or an errant shoe, the line of powder would have been broken. I always thought it was weird we had a huge container of cinnamon. The thing hardly fit on the shelf! Who uses this much cinnamon?! We did. Our defense against the ants. But that wouldn't work here… The ants don't walk on the ground, they walk on the walls.

"Didn't the ants walk on the walls back home? Why didn't they just walk around the cinnamon?"