My Purple Sweat Pants

Purple Sweat Pants

I am terrified of spiders. It goes back to when I was nine years old and lived in Marina, California. Every night, without fail, I would lay awake staring at the ceiling as little black things scurried around. How could I sleep knowing that there were spiders crawling on the ceiling over my head? I would call my parents in to kill the eight-legged beasts. We only lived in that particular house for about a year. That was long enough for me to develop a hatred and fear of spiders.

When I was fifteen years old, my family moved to Lake Elsinore, California. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the new place we moved into. Our home was on two-and-a-half acres and had a small mountain range behind the property line. There were tall trees; some of them were pepper trees and often the yard smelled of pepper. All around the house were weeds – tall weeds – just brimming with bug life. I just knew that one day I would come face to face (or foot to eight-legged foot) with a spider. I avoided the weeds with cautiousness.

One day, when I was seventeen years old, I came home from my church’s youth group. I was ready to unwind. My day at school had been a long one with all my teachers spouting off ridiculous amounts of homework. I spent a couple hours doing that homework and was excited to go to youth group – thinking I could have fun and unwind there. That was a joke. I spent two hours with kids my age that were too immature. To make matters worse, I was starving.

The first thing I always do when I get home from anywhere is kick off my shoes, strip off my jeans and pull on sweat pants. I don’t function well at home in jeans. I can go all day in jeans just fine, but the moment I step through the threshold of my home, it becomes as unbearable as a broken air conditioner in the middle of August.

“Mom, I’m home!” I shouted as I stepped through the backdoor and into the dimly lit laundry room.

“Ok. I’m in the shower,” my mom hollered to me from the back of the house. From my mom’s bathroom, I could hear I heard the pitter patter rhythm of water hitting the shower door.

“Alright,” I replied as I automatically stripped off my jeans right there in the laundry room. I looked down and saw my purple sweat pants strewn on the floor in front of the washing machine. I had tossed them there before I left for the youth group. Relieved to see my fleecy friend, I reached out, picked up my sweats and flung the jeans where the sweat pants had been.

A fleeting thought entered my mind that I should shake out my sweat pants before I put them on. Spiders seemed to call our home their own, as if the two-and-a-half acres outside wasn’t enough for them. As quick as the thought came, it left. My stomach growled and all I could think about was hurrying so I could eat something. I didn’t hesitate and hauled up my sweats.

I felt the cold linoleum under my feet as I hurried to the kitchen pantry. I glanced at the clock on the microwave – 8:55 PM. Perusing the pantry’s contents and feeling as if I would pass out from hunger, I decided on something quick and easy: a can of vegetable beef soup. I dug through the pan cupboard, clanking around until I found the small saucepan.

Click. Click. Click. Whoosh. The burner ignited. As I carefully poured the soup in the pan, I felt a tickling sensation on my left leg. It felt like my stubbly leg hair was catching like Velcro on the inner fuzzies of the sweat pants. Without thinking, I automatically swatted at my leg with my right foot trying to unhook any stuck bristles of my leg hair. The tickling stop; I thought I was successful. I continued stirring the bits of potato, carrots, and other vegetables in the brown broth. I breathed deep. Mmmmm, it smelled good.

“Dang it,” I said to myself. I felt the tickling again. “Man, I should have shaved today.”

I smacked my left leg with my right foot again. The tickling stopped.

My stomach sent up irritated gurgles in protest to food not being fed to it sooner; I wanted the soup to hurry and heat up. Like a tar pit, bubbles slowly started breaking the surface of the soup. I smiled, happy that the soup was almost ready.

I heard the shower turn off. I looked over to the clock – 9:00 PM. I felt the tickling yet again. I sighed, irritated at myself again for not shaving. I nonchalantly rubbed my right foot on my left leg as I continued stirring the soup. This time the tickling didn’t stop. Then it hit me: something was in my pants!

“Oh no! It is probably a spider!” I thought to myself in a panic. Visions of spiders on the ceiling when I was nine years old came flooding into my brain.

I gasped, dropping the mixing spoon into the soup. Bits of broth went splashing all over the stove top like brown globs of paint flung recklessly on a canvas. I quickly reached down and grabbed the elastic at my ankle. I vigorously shook my leg back and forth like my life depended on it and prayed the spider would fall out soon.

It didn’t take much shaking for the bug to plummet out. I looked down and to my horror it wasn’t an eight-legged creature – it was a centipede! That had ninety-two more legs! And not just any regular centipede, but the biggest I had ever seen! It must have been at least five inches long.

“AHHHHHHH!” I screamed at the top of my lungs like a little girl – loud and high pitched. I instinctively leapt with an almost superhero bound from the side of the kitchen where the stove was to the complete opposite end near the living room in one swift motion. My chest burned from fear and from the screaming.

“What’s wrong, Celeste?” my mom asked in alarm as she came rushing in wearing nothing but her underwear and a towel on her head.

Breathless from screaming and from sheer panic, I just pointed in the direction of the centipede which was flipping and flopping all over the place like a fish out of water. My mom stared at the centipede for a moment, and then looked at me in what can only be described as skepticism that her seventeen year old daughter was freaking out about a centipede.

“Mom,” I gasped, “that thing was in my pants!”

Shock registered in my mom’s sapphire eyes. “We need to catch it,” she exclaimed.

I looked dumbfounded at her. I didn’t want to do it. Before I could express my fear, she ran into the kitchen, grabbed a large mouth mason jar and trapped the hundred-legged creature just in the nick of time: the centipede had just regained its bearings and was ready to scurry off.

“So now what do we do?” I asked my mom as I watched the centipede’s creepy-crawly legs flail all about as it ran around its glass prison, trying to find a means of escape.

“We kill it. Go grab me that paper,” my mom spoke. I obeyed my mom and got the paper.

“Here,” I said as I cautiously walked near her next to the centipede.

“Slide it underneath,” my mom ordered. I gingerly slid the paper under the mouth of the mason jar. The centipede wasn’t happy about the foreign object being slipped underneath him. In remonstration, he started going berserk and began scrambling every which way he could, even tried to crawl up the walls of the jar.

I shuddered, “Mom, that thing just spent five minutes roaming freely in my pants!”

“What?” my mom’s eyes met mine and her eyebrows rose in disbelief. “Five minutes in your pants? How did that happen?”

As the centipede skittered around in the mason jar, I told her what happened.

“You didn’t shake your pants out?” she inquired of me.

“No. I thought about it but was so hungry I just didn’t,” I explained sheepishly.

In the midst of everything, my stomach’s feelings were forgotten and it was just then when I realized that the soup was still on the stove cooking. I looked over. The soup was rapidly boiling and showering brown broth onto anything in its reach. I ran over to the stove and turned off the burner. My mom carefully turned the mason jar right-side up, making sure to not move or loosen the paper. The centipede wasn’t happy about being jostled around so in protest it scuttled around angrily at the bottom of the jar. It was obviously having a hard night – it wasn’t about to get any easier for it either.

“So, how should we kill it?” I asked my mom.

“We can flush it down the toilet,” she suggested. My mind was filled with scary images of too many movies growing up where things came out of toilets. I could just see centipedes spilling out of the toilet while I was sitting on top of it.

“Uh…” I began.

She seemed to sense my apprehension and suggested we lift the paper of quickly and fill the jar partway with hot water. That way it would drown and then we could flush it. Neither one of us fancied the idea of stomping on it. The idea of having to hear the squishing and crunching sounds that would come from stepping on it, made us too nauseous to consider that method of death.

We went to the sink and turned the faucet to hot. After a moment, the water was hot enough to cook a centipede. The hot water splashed inside the jar and completely took the centipede by surprise. It attempted to swim and crawl up the side of the glass at the same time. We couldn’t bear to watch so we put a plate on top of the jar, placed it on the counter and walked away.

I went to the computer and got online. My fingers raced over the keys with a clickety-clack as I searched the web to find out about centipedes. I came to a page that had big pictures of centipedes. To me, it was grotesque and I started getting the willies just looking at them. I scrolled down to the part where it talked about centipede characteristics. My eyes widened and I gasped.

“They’re poisonous!” I cried out to my mom, who was back in her room putting clothes on.

“Oh my goodness! Good thing it didn’t bite you!” she shouted out for me to hear.

I sat there with a creepy-crawly feeling. “It was in my pants for five minutes,” I thought to myself and shook my head from side to side like I was watching a fast paced tennis game.

Later that night, after the centipede had died in its watery grave, I gladly flushed it down the toilet and watched it swirl and swish until it was out of sight.

It has been thirteen years since my run-in with that centipede. I can sit here and rationally tell myself that I wouldn’t have died from a centipede bite, and the cliché of it being more scared of me than I am of it. But upon seeing a centipede and its one hundred legs flailing about, I can actually feel its legs crawling on my skin. That is when my rationale flees and I instinctively shudder, feeling compelled to kill it. This makes me realize that my fear of spiders has taken a backseat to my fear centipedes. After all, a centipede has ninety-two more legs than a spider – much more appendages to skitter across my skin.