The other night I pulled out the pale pink ukulele from its matching gig bag. I wanted to tune it, but also, refamiliarize myself with it. The amount of reading and writing I had to get through at UCLA kept me from my own ukulele for a good six months. I wanted to make sure that I remembered a few songs, so Astrid could see what her new gift could do.
After everyone else made their way to bed, I sat crossed-legged on the old wooden floors in the gamle hus. I stared down at the ground—at an app on my phone—and adjusted the tension of each string accordingly. A dark black bug quickly scurried passed. After living in Los Angeles as long as I have, I first thought I was seeing a very large cockroach, but then I realized no, it was just a very large spider.
They are everywhere in Denmark. In a single day at Askov, Maria found a spider crawling on her three different times. Here in Hornbæk there’s at least two on each window. And there’s a lot of windows! “They’re not poisonous,” Helena told me the other day. “We have a lot of snakes and spiders in Hornbæk, but they’re harmless.”
As my late-night intruder scurried underneath the sofa, I reminded him of this: “Helena told me you were harmless.” Thank god the couch is on the other side of the room as the bed.
The next morning, I was coming home from my run to find an even larger uglier spider had built a web across the hinges of the door of the gamle hus. He had a bunch of yellow stripes across his body and I didn’t like that he was there. Pointing my finger at him from a safe distance, I said, “Just don’t come inside the house.” He didn’t. He kept himself stationed right at the entrance the entire day.
I spent most of my time exploring Hornbæk, the bigger beach, with its unusual (for Denmark) sand-dunes. I finished the first chapter of the Danish novella I’m reading at a sweet little cafe. Sure the chapter was only a page-and-a-half, and sure it took me two days to get through that much, but I still felt accomplished. Everyday I’m using more and more Danish with the strangers that I meet—the risk is fairly low, as they can easily switch to English if I don’t understand something. But that’s happening a little less each day.
I came back to the house around 4pm, to attend the kids' sommerfest—a summer party for the preschoolers and kindergartners, with some activities and games, ending with a large picnic spread across the large soccer field. The kids painted rocks and sprinkled them with glitter at a miniature picnic table. They wrapped dough around the tip of a stick, and held that tip over little fires. Once the dough became bread, they pulled it off and spread jam in the middle.
They also had a plastic yellow bucket on a table with live spiders inside, many crawling out over the top. One of the fathers casually picked up the escapees with the tips of his fingers and dropped them back in the bucket. Helena laughed as my jaw dropped. I was the only one there—and this includes small children—who was the least bit unsettled. They just had a bucket full of spiders—you know—for fun.
After the kids had gone to bed, the three of us were talking in the kitchen of the main house. “When I was a little girl and asked my dad to kill a spider in my room,” I confessed, “I was always afraid that the friends and family of that spider would come back as a spider-army and exact their revenge.”
“Well that’s what they’re doing right now,” Rasmus teased. “They just waited until you were in Hornbæk.”
I thought of that spider stationed at the door of the gamle hus, waiting in the dark for me, and I turned to Helena. She burst out laughing.
“Maybe you should go with her to the gamle hus,” she suggested to Rasmus, “and remove that spider from the door.”
I threw my hand up. I’m a grown woman in my thirties. I should have the life skills required to maneuver around a spider—he’s not even poisonous—although he sure is ugly. I pulled out my cellphone to light up the short pathway between the two houses and when I got there, the spider was gone. So was his web. As if someone or something wiped it clean—and I know it was not me! Somehow I found this a little more disturbing.
I checked the door. It was still locked, and I was the only one who had the key. I shined my cellphone light in the various crevices, but I couldn’t find him. He was big enough that if he was there, I would have seen him. He better not have packed his web in a little spider-suitcase and moved it all inside.
I got ready for bed—did my best to forget about the bright yellow spider bucket and the laughing children around it—and attempted to fall asleep.
Didn’t our ancestors survive in part because of their fear of spiders? Haven’t we evolved to expect and maintain our distance from these creatures? And why doesn’t this seem to apply any of the Danes? Or their children? It’s a little disturbing.
Until next time, stay away from arachnoids. They’re not as harmless in California. Vi ses.
