Last night, before bed, I had put newspapers down in anticipation of the mess, having spent the day before dodging doggy-do and mopping the floor with Tilex. Still, the dog managed to hit the few spots that were un-papered – remarkable aim considering the dire circumstances that must have compelled the beast to soil the house in the first place.

What’s wrong with the dog, what’s making her ill, you ask. My answer - I don’t give a shit (I realize this is a pun, one I intended). I’ve given her half a bottle of Pepto Bismal and stern talking to about the consequences should she defecate even one more time inside the house.

I know the old adage, feed a cold, starve a fever. And feel, somehow, betrayed that the old, wise folk who develop and deliver such truths forgot to generate any catchy saying pertaining to a house-pet’s GI distress. So I’m going with the starving bit and have decided not to feed the damn dog until I observe a noticeable weakening in the shit storm.

For those of you who’ve been wondering why it’s been taking me so long to publish my next post, just imagine me down on my knees, holding my breath while dabbing ineffectually at the god-awful mess my dog has left me. Imagine how it is to be so lightheaded and exhausted from all that scrubbing and lack of oxygen and the effort expended swallowing back your own vomit, that you have no choice but to return to bed immediately after cleansing the mudroom. It’s like a swoon, an enduring faintness that really fucks with a person’s motivation and eagerness to meet the day. Imagine me hanging the Gone-Back-to-Bed-Because-This-Morning-Is-Unbearable sign on the door knob and forgive me the spotty blogging.

(Just a little part of me is currently dreaming that this bout of tummy trouble just might usher in a doggy-ending. I can hear myself saying, Natural causes. Couldn’t be helped. Doesn’t the house stay clean a lot longer without our canine friend who we remember fondly but, on days like today, could probably live without?)

It was nearly a week ago that we herded Julia into the cat carrier, suffering deep lacerations and puncture wounds, all in the interest of giving her a better life, simplifying our own existence and dramatically decreasing the pet hair accumulation beneath the piano and on the back of the arm chairs.

By all reports from her adoptive family she is adjusting well. She is lavished with attention and given wet food and allowed to send the nights sleeping on pillows, in the company of humans rather than relegated to the confines of our dark, cold attic. Julia’s life has improved dramatically. My life has been made a bit easier for one less obligation, one less beating heart to care for.

But then there’s Cato, our other cat, who preceded Julia in our home by eight years, who, by all observation did not care one bit for Julia and has hissed and growled his way through the past four years, barely enduring her presence. It would appear that even cats can suffer the old, “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” scenario and now it appears that our remaining cat, our twelve year old, fat and grouchy cat, is actually heart broken.

Who knew that an independent, stand-offish feline could feel such agony? Never before have I witnessed acute animal longing. Cato prowls the house by day yowling, omni-present, underfoot and on top of key boards, all together fierce with a new need for attention. By night he cries from his place in the attic that has grown that much darker, that much colder and bleak without the presence of his female, feline friend. He is a shell of a cat, just patching it together. It turns out that he needed Julia in a deeply meaningful way and now that she is gone, he suffers.

It almost breaks my heart save for the fact that I am so pissed off after an entire night of listening to him wail from the attic that I ripped open the attic door and carried him to the back porch this morning, tossing him unlovingly to the elements, banishing him to the outside, desperate for just an hour of peace.

He now sits atop the grill, just below the kitchen window and mews to come in, crying with loneliness. His pain evident and outward and on the wind for all the neighborhood cats to hear. He has given up on pretense and pride. He is publicly ravaged. I feel like taking him aside and saying, “You know, Cato, I understand your regret, It’s always better to have said too much than to never have said what you need to say.” But in his cathood, he is inconsolable. And we can do nothing but weep right along with him.

There’s no mild segue back to obligation and necessity in my life, it’s just one giant muddle of minor mishaps that bundle up and make me want to keen and rant and flee to dark corners. I suppose it began before we even left, when I retrieved the luggage from the attic only to find that one of the fucking cats has been using the L.L. Bean Duffle bag as a litter box. (Have I mentioned how much I hate my cats?) Both felines were sternly reprimanded. The cat box was thoroughly cleansed and fresh litter applied just in case the cat in question was objecting to the general condition of the facilities. But then I remembered that the little one, the black and tan whiskery runt, once shat on my daughter’s sleeping bag that we kept beneath our bed to accommodate childish night wanderings and the need to sleep close to parental looking people in order to fool the Boogie man. Before our flight, a new piece of luggage was purchased at Marshall’s to the tune of a $100. (We gave up on the sleeping bag idea a long time ago.)

And then there’s the dog that, while kenneled during our vacation, was diagnosed with Lyme disease and administered antibiotics that must be continued for at least a month, twice a day, at $55 a bottle. When I inquired about the efficacy of the Lyme disease vaccination I seem to remember paying $64 for back in September, I was told that no vaccination is one hundred percent effective. “Oh I see, I see,” said the dumb blond, realizing she’d been fleeced by the over-entrepreneurial veterinarian.

With the all pets accounted for and expensive, it’s on to the children who both have dental appointments next week. Dental appointments? Wasn’t it just weeks ago that I was writing posts about extractions and nitrous oxide? Upon checking the dates, I have confirmed that it has been six months since the last frightfully expensive trip to the dentist. Time to steal ourselves for the next installment in the ongoing saga to save my son’s teeth.

This appointment is ill timed to coincide with some other major expenditures: the kids’ piano tuition is due today – we pay for lessons up front, their ten week tennis clinic must be paid for on Friday (after all, tennis is a life-sport), if O wants to play Spring baseball he must register and pay by week’s end though practices don’t start until April, my niece has a birthday tomorrow, my sister-in-law turns forty next Monday and my step-mother-in-law will be the big five-0 in six days, (both adults expect significant gifts, the child will be happy with a book). Oh, and the car won’t start and apparently needs a new battery, the plow company has just sent the bill for clearing our significant seasonal snowfall and the country club that we already can’t afford has sent notice that the membership dues have been “reassessed”, which is their refined way of saying bend over while we stick this bill up your arse along with your mortgage company and your insurance company and every other organization that has raised its rates in the first quarter of this new year.

And, and, and… I could go on, but let me just share the kicker.

This weekend, while playing Madden Football on the Wii (have I mentioned just how much I loathe the Wii?), O stepped backwards on one foot while shaking his numchuck furiously and cursing at the screen (which is apparently how all Wii games are played, sort of tipsy and wild, half blind with frustration), just as the dog was slipping along behind him. Ass over tea kettle he went and came crashing down on the coffee table, snapping it in two. Legs splintered (the table’s not his), the whole mahogany, antique thing of it unsalvageable.

I didn’t adore the table but it was old and finer than anything we could have bought on our own as it was inherited from my father-in-law who upgraded to a cushy, sueded, ottoman-type of coffee table sometime back. I’ve done the research and a replacement table of the same period and provenance as the one now dismembered in my basement will cost between $500 and $1500. For now we will make due with the table we bought at a yard sale back in ‘92. It has been in storage for just such an occasion, (the complete destruction of all things finer) and anxiously awaiting a relaunch. It is tired and worn and completely too modern for our entirely antique home, in other words, it’s a design disaster. But it’s seen some action. It was the sole table in our collegiate flop pad and having served the needs of five delinquent academics, I think it can handle anything the Wii, my children and my three pets have to offer. Just don’t expect an invitation for coffee anytime soon.

All the grim excitement was obscured by the hemlock trees, the dense hedge between our yard and the Harrison’s. So thorough and opaque a barrier that I have, in two years, exchanged ten words, maybe twenty with the people next door.

I dash to the second floor to get a better look. A woman, maybe Mrs. Harrison, but I’ve only met her once so couldn’t say for sure, slightly gray, wearing a wool pea coat and holding her purse across her chest, walks carefully up the icy walk and disappears into the house. The ambulance moves off slowly, no sirens, lights extinguished. And it looks convincingly like the final moments of someone else’s tragedy.

Later a light goes on in the room above the garage. A single lamp, perhaps to read a book by while she eats her dinner in her lap and tries to forget the heart attack that has taken her husband just four days before their daughter is due home from Middlebury for Winter Break; just eight days before Christmas, on an afternoon that is sunny but bitingly cold. After dinner, she will try for rest in the bed that was theirs. And in her fitful sleep her feet will seek the warmth where he had lain and find it cold.

She will invite the golden retriever to join her in the bed. The dog will be confused, having been relegated to the oval carpet by the foot of the stairs for nine whole years. She will stroke the dog’s fur and find it soothing.

She had named the dog her ‘pet-peeve’. She had laughed and told friends about his shedding and his propensity to lift his leg on the living room couch. She had never considered herself much of a dog person, a pet person, really. She once would have been entirely content to be canine-free. But she can see the future, a dog in her bed, a dog for whom she must remember to wake and administer pills for arthritis and eczema. The orange-yellow pill bottles lined up in the medicine cabinet, each one labeled Peeve Harrison, two tablets daily, to be given with food.

And while my mind trips from moon walk to space craft, it then jerks spastically from space craft to monkeys. I think NASA and see primates strapped to crude rockets and fired into the void. Animal sacrifice, flying monkeys -an idea inspired by the L. Frank Baum? While the Wizard of Oz was written in 1900, the first monkey-launch was in 1948. Nearly half a century devoted to the idea of sending Albert, a Rhesus monkey into space. Albert I died in flight. Suffocation. His namesakes, Alberts II through V, were also unlucky. Suffocation, force of impact and fiery explosions. All Alberts lost.

And then the geniuses at NASA, ruling out the possibility that bad science was the source of the problem, retired the name ‘Albert’. And finally, in 1959, Able and Miss Baker returned to earth safely. Mission accomplished. Able has been ‘preserved’ and is on display at the Smithsonian. A mummified hero of primate proportions.

While my brain is firing at random, let’s talk Christmas ornaments. The holiday is sort of a loose affair in this household. Egg nog and stockings -sure. Well wrapped presents – certainly. Jesus -kind of. Shrine to space monkeys – you bet. There is a whole section of the Frasier Fir dedicated to our friends the astronaut monkeys. At least four of them (pictured here) dangle daintily from the drooping branches. I feel just a little bit better about animal testing of all kinds, now that we honor the Alberts and the Ables and the Miss Bakers of the world on Christmas.

But the hunt is on. The dog senses the sacred status of those felt friends and is now pacing the perimeter of the tree hoping for an opportunity to relieve us of one of those monkeys. She’ll settle for a butterfly or drummer boy but it’s the monkeys she’s really after. She has been there since 6:30 this morning. Salivating. Devising a plan. Watching those monkeys hanging like temptation from mid-tree, which might as well be space.

But first I have to tell you about my spider…

I am not an insect-phobe (I’m sure there’s a technical word for this but looking it up will be wasting precious writing time and so I leave it at insect-phobe until Anymouse corrects me in the comment section). I can muster the courage to crush a fly and spray whole cans of Raid at an army of ants, and I’ve always been able to handle spiders smaller than nickels just long enough to remove them from the corners of the living room and place them outside. But I never, ever fancied I’d find myself actually feeling something akin to affection for a lowly arachnoid.

Clearly, somewhere deep down, EB White has influenced my otherwise sensible self into thinking that spiders have purpose and personality and a soft spot for doomed farm animals, because I have come to know a spider I call ‘Mama’. She has lived for months just beyond the east window of the master bedroom; there she has built the most elaborate shimmering web the size of a bath towel. She has spent her days hanging from the center of her spectacular creation, shuttling with purpose to the fringes of her web to collect the insects that have blundered there. She has wrapped them up in tiny bundles, her eight synchronized legs working quickly to mummify her prey. She leaves them there to hang and marinate. She eats them later when I’m not looking, not because she senses my distaste but, probably, because they taste better after a few hours of subtle tenderizing – a spider’s version of brining, this mummification thing. Nevertheless, I have always thanked her for her consideration.

O and G have made it habit to charge into the bedroom each morning as soon as My Better Half has deigned to rise so that they can say good morning to ‘Mama’. It was on one such morning, a week ago, that we noticed Mama had put on weight, she was fairly bulging at the abdomen. Obviously, she had either eaten a chipmunk for dinner or she was swollen with spider-child. I thought to myself, am I imagining things or does a spider show just like a very pregnant human female? I wondered if she’d slept poorly, feeling all those little legs kicking and twirling and restless in her spider-like uterus. I announced to the kids, Mama is going to have babies and they were instantly gleeful and pleased and then, G, recovering her senses, asked with uncharacteristic solemnity, “But then she’ll die. Just like Charlotte. Won’t she?”

We were momentarily quiet while the possibility of Mama’s imminent death sunk in. And then, whatever doubt I harbored about her pending reproduction was swiftly cast aside as we watched Mama charge to the Northeast corner of her web, rip a struggling bug from the sticky strands and eat him on the spot, no brining, no mummification, this was instant and terrifying in it’s savagery. Her unrestrained feasting seemed so natural and necessary, like an engorged woman named Mildred, nine months pregnant and ravenous, tearing into a box of jelly donuts.

This fit of extreme hunger was the memory that Mama chose to leave us with for awhile. I thought it was the last time we would see her, her insect slaughter a sort of parting shot across the bow. Until the other night. Just when I’d grown accustomed to the idea that she was off being busy somewhere else doing busy spider things or, gasp, she had passed and we didn’t notice, just as natural as the turning of leaves in Autumn or the waxing and waning of the moon, there she was again.

After days of her absence, I had thought to check for her in the dark of midnight. I went to the window and saw her there, gathering up the lower half of her web. I could barely make her out, struggling to drag in the perfect spectacle of it. I couldn’t tell if she was eating it or rolling it but it was clear she was laying waste to her home. I thought, She and it will be gone by morning.

But upon waking and drawing back the drapes, there it was, another beautiful sparking web with one glaring omission, no ‘Mama’ hanging at the center. And for two days now, she has not returned. We have gazed at it, hoping, but nothing stirs? And, then this morning, I was trying to muster the heart to tear that web, once and for all, from the window casing when I noticed a tiny pale little life making it’s way across the intricacy. It was Mama’s mini-me. The same in every way except stature. And my soul stirred.

Is it possible that Mama remade her web, lovingly, proficient with the purpose of imminent death, in the final hours before her eggs hatched? Was I witness to the spider version of ‘nesting’? Will at least one of Mama’s progeny take up residence in the web there outside the bedroom window? And will I have to bring it in for winter, allow it to set up shop above the radiator in the bathroom for fear of waking to frozen Mama-me one icy cold December morning?

(I’ll keep you all informed about Mama-me’s progress and her plans for Winter because, well I just assume, that you’re all as amazed and taken with her story as I am.)