Spring in Your Step

Beautiful osmanthus flowers blooming under the auspice of a Shanghai spring.

One day, I will have a backyard full of these trees...

Pleasant weather does wonders for your soul. Shanghai has been blessed by a chain of beautiful CLEAR days where the temperature hovers around 50-60 degrees. I have rarely seen blue skies in China. We've had nearly three in a row this week. It makes me want to skip around throwing confetti into the air. :)

A few days ago while I was brushing my teeth getting ready for work, I discovered a daddy-long-legs crouched on my bathroom ceiling totally spying on me. Pervert! There aren't many animals that I am truly disgusted by... I can handle snakes, lizards, amphibians, worms, rodents... you know, most things that get counted as pestilence. But I CANNOT handle arachnids or insects. I HATE SPIDERS AND BUGS SOOOOO MUCH, they creep the living shit out of me. At the same time, I have an equal (if not greater) repulsion against killing. I really don't like you being in my apartment, Mr. Legs, and you are so gross and disgusting and disproportional, but I cannot squash you. So I took a big Tupperware box and coaxed him into it (oh it was such a precarious process!), and then released him in my apartment's garden on the way out that morning. It's not Mr. Legs' fault that I find him so creepy crawly, so now he can be all creepy crawly amongst the grass and trees and eat bugs all day. Yay!

It started pouring that afternoon, and by the time I got back home the garden was practically flooded. Suddenly I felt really terrible -- had I accidentally sentenced Mr. Legs to waterboarding? Did my good intentions go awry? Was Mr. Legs dead when all I wanted to do was save him? Sure my apartment was warm and cozy, but there's no way that Mr. Legs could feed himself in my (generally?) bug-free environment. But at least he wouldn't be sopping wet. 

I thought about how it must have felt for Mr. Legs to be chilling upside down, probably spacing out or something, and then get suddenly encased by plastic from all sides. And then after a few harrowing minutes of getting bounced around, get unceremoniously shaken out and dumped on some greens. Were you city-folk, Mr. Legs? By no means did Mr. Legs have any control over his fate -- but should I have been less empathetic, he could have easily become Spider Pancake. Spider Pancake <<< Wet Spider, right?

How many times in our lives have we encountered earth-shattering developments that are totally beyond our control?

It rained all night, but the weather has been beautiful since. :)

Now when I come home my eyes will always wander to the spot where I last left Mr. Legs. I like coming home everyday thinking that I have a friend hidden in that garden. As truly grotesque as he is.