Last night after the kids were asleep, I settled in for some rare time with my husband. We sat in bed watching his laptop- specifically, the Bible videos now available on LDS.org (which are quite good, by the way). I rested my head on his shoulder and relaxed.

I felt a tickle on the back of my neck. I have very long hair that sometime has a mind of its own, so at first I thought (hoped) it was just that. But it felt different. I went into full fight-or-flight mode, couldn't decide which to do, and did both. There in the soft light of my husband's laptop I did a wild interpretive dance about the fear of creepy crawly things, chanting "Please don't be a spider! Please don't be a spider!"

My dear, strong companion, who is more arachnophobic than even I, fled the bed in record time and dove for the light switch. The bulb was out. By now I was standing at the foot of the bed pointing and whisper-yelling something I don't remember, probably incomprehensible. He ran to my nightstand and turned my lamp on.

And there she was. The biggest spider I had seen in quite a long time, and I grew up in the country. Let's call her Shelob. Shelob seemed aware of her sudden mortal danger. She stood at first on a book under the lamp, clearly sizing us up (he was standing at the foot of the bed with me now), and decided to run. She headed for my laptop, thought better of it, and instead decided to rappel from the edge of the off-white table for the camouflage of the carpet.

There was another book on the floor just underneath her (we love books in our house). When she hit the book, we heard it. A very audible little "thunk". Such was the size of Shelob.

That's about how long it took my husband to get back to the nightstand with some object he'd grabbed on the way and send Shelob to another realm. "What kind was it?", I asked. His words of comfort to me were, "I think it was a wolf spider, you know the kind that run around and catch other bugs, but I didn't know they could get that big!"

We retreated to the bathroom and shook and brushed imaginary spiders off of ourselves for a few minutes. He started talking about the movie Arachnophobia, and the possibility of many snakes on the land  we want to buy in the country, until I gave him The Look and he stopped. Eventually we braved the bed again, and settled in for a restless night of fitful sleep.