6:50 am. A screeching sound wakes me up and I ask my wife, or the universe, “what in the world is that?” I dash down the hall toward the sound, which by now I have guessed is a smoke detector. Over the door to the basement is the source of the alarm, a flashing, screeching smoke detector but with no evidence of smoke or steam or anything that would set it off. I have a passing thought about carbon monoxide, but that detector is in the basement. This one is old and basic, just a detector of smoke. I also know they go off when the battery is low, but this isn’t that kind of noise, the quick sounds with long spaces between them. This is in full alarm mode, get up, get out kind of screeching.
I reach up and grab the thing off the wall and pull off the top after some struggle to pull at the right side to actually get it open. Out drops a small spider and the detector stops going off. This spider set off my smoke detector! He’s just a gray spider the size of the tip of my pinky finger! Impressed with the spider’s ability to have such a big impact, I get a glass, cover him up and carry him outside. Be free! You will live an outdoors life now with different challenges than smoke detectors!
I’ll never know how this happened. The button to push to set it off is as big as the spider and pushing it is hard for me sometimes; I’m sure the spider could not have done that. I imagine the spider actually having the current go through its body and making a circuit which set off the alarm. But I don’t know if it could survive that current. Or maybe it did, and it will grow to some comic book kind of super spider outside.
Are there lessons to be learned from this? I don’t know, maybe that small things in nature have a big impact. Don’t underestimate little things or people. It was time for me to get up and I got an unusual alarm? Wonder is everywhere if you just look for it. Maybe you can think of another lesson, or maybe it doesn’t need a lesson. It just was a memorable way to start a day!
Another story from a few years ago: There is a grocery superstore nearby where we get a lot of our groceries and other items we need. One afternoon I went to my car in our garage attached to our house. I don’t walk around in the house with “outside shoes” so I kicked off my house shoes in the garage and put on a pair of old shoes that I use for grass cutting. The drive from home to the grocery is about six to seven minutes, which is why we go there so often; it’s really close by.
Hopping out of the car at the grocery I feel something in my shoe, but I walk on up to the door. I stop and pull off the uncomfortable shoe and a huge black spider crawls out and runs across the walk. This spider looked like it could have had some powerful venom to make me sick or worse. It had just hitched a ride in my shoe! How did I get my shoe on without smashing the spider? And why did it not bite me since it had a perfectly good shoe home all to itself until my foot came along? For a few minutes my foot and the spider shared a crowded space.
Are there lessons to be learned from this? I don’t know, maybe that things we fear don’t always hurt us? You never know what might have made home in your shoes if you leave them in the garage? Wonder is everywhere if you just look for it. Maybe you can think of another lesson, or maybe it doesn’t need a lesson. It just was a memorable trip to the grocery!
It is true that nature goes on around us all the time. Before and after a recent storm the birds were singing and flying around in my neighborhood. They were going to live and do what they do regardless of what might happen or whatever had happened. The pouring rain or the rushing water of a flash flood didn’t stop them. While we humans were listening to dire predictions of danger and making our preparations, the birds, animals, and even spiders found ways to survive and thrive!
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… Matthew 6:26 NIV
