THERE HE WASN'T


High on a ladder. Well, as high as I wanted to be, I stretched to cut off a dead palm frond. It lay below a big palm branch I'd sliced off earlier. A green palm pod with another hard barked frond would fall as soon as I sawed off the one closest to me.

As I sawed and pulled, I saw some wet web build. All was quiet around the uncovered spot. When all of a sudden...

Our daughter said "Don't mess with it. If a scorpion comes out, you'll jump back and fall off the ladder."

She, at the other end of the ladder, holding it so much better than my Little League aged son dressed in his Yankee uniform and ready to get to the playing field back in the eighties when I asked him to hold the ladder while I was high on a rung trimming a huge oak. He roughly placed both hands on the ladder as if he were grounding it. My knees buckled, but I was able to steady myself after my heart quit racing. But I digress.

I thought, "She is right." Down from the ladder I came leaving whatever kind of nest in the making exposed to the elements.

After all, it well could have been an arachnid spider scorpion tick mite as the one pictured above. Or it simply could have been a cockroach nest. But I followed her advise and as the poet once said, "and that made all the difference".