Behind the Ironic Column

I had attempted that chore a couple of weeks ago when one of the rain/wind storms hit and I had to abandon any kind of outside activity.  But I left my tools and leather gardening gloves out there on the ledge (safely away from the water and wind)  – on the theory that the storms would break later that day or the next and I’d get back to that chore.  Well, the storms didn’t break and by the time we hit anything like suitable weather again, I’d moved on to other activities.  So today I realized that the sun was partly out, the wind wasn’t howling, and it would be a good chance to finish up that work with the plants.  Maybe I was inspired by the approach of Thanksgiving or maybe by the sheer volume of chores I’d been putting off.  At any rate, I put on my long-sleeved wool shirt and went out to survey the mess.  Lots of dead branches and prickly limbs and scattered leaves and sticks (from all that wind).  After scratching the back of my hand on the first stick, I remembered why gloves were a good idea.  So I grabbed them from their corner and tapped them on the railing to knock off the leaves that had fallen on them.  These gloves have been with me through a lot of adventures and thousands of hours of raking and mulching and planting.  Things I don’t do very much now living in the city with only a balcony.  So they’re pretty beat up and stiff but still protect my hands.  Absent-mindedly, I put them on and leaned over to get a grip on one of the big semi-dead plants that needed to be removed.  The sudden sharp pain in my little finger felt exactly like something had stabbed me; I let go of the plant and looked at my hand but there was nothing evident on the outside of the glove – the pain however was getting worse.  Ripping the glove off, I still couldn’t see any obvious cause of the pain.  I came inside, washed off the dirt, and ran cold water over my fingers.  No holes in the skin that I could see, which had to mean that there was something inside the glove – probably a spider.  There are dozens of the big garden spiders around, but they don’t crawl into things and hide.  They prefer to trap you by spinning a web across the door or the chair.  We have two poisonous spiders here in western Oregon – the famous black widow and the brown recluse.  I’ve never seen a black widow here and my experience with the eastern variety wouldn’t lead me to believe that they’d crawl into a glove, much less into the smallest finger of a glove, to lie in wait.  The brown recluse on the other hand would likely do such a thing – if it were on a balcony in downtown Portland at all which didn’t seem really likely  to me.  Given that the pain was not subsiding and that my finger was rapidly swelling, I called for medical advice.  The nurse I got on the phone confirmed my spider theories and volunteered that it wasn’t likely to be a bee because they don’t hang around in the colder weather.  She also advised me about possible serious effects that should send me to an emergency room (I always worry about exactly how stiff my muscles would have to get before I need to go to the ER and how I’m supposed to get there if my muscles have stiffened…) .  As I was waiting on phone  hold, I remembered why this pain felt familiar.  It was exactly like the pain of a yellow jacket or wasp sting.  I was stung fairly often as a child – always with immediate pain and swelling.  It’s been more than 20 years since I got smart enough to avoid them, but the experience isn’t the kind of thing you forget.  But I’ve never seen either critter on my balcony over the summer.  I see them downtown in the usual places near trash cans, etc. during the warmer months, but not in November.