Inherently evil

No, I'm not going to talk about treats in the office again, although I did just negate my Special K breakfast by eating a whole bunch of peanut M&Ms for second breakfast.

Saturday I cleaned the dead plants off my front porch. My herb pot died as soon as the summer got hot and I left it there along with various houseplants that never got moved inside after we moved into our house this past spring. It was kind of a death garden. Not really that pretty. But I always forgot about it because I hardly ever use the front door, sad as that is to say. I'm always getting in the car and driving off somewhere. (I miss my walkable Salt Lake City neighborhood a lot.)

Anyway if you leave a lot of dead plants out all summer in this part of the world, you have created a wonderful habitat for spiders. Lots of daddy longlegs and one fat, shiny black widow. I stomped on it first, and then stopped to shudder and think about what would have happened if it had been resting on the rim of the pot instead of behind it. I would have been bitten.

I have a feeling it's irrational of me, but I think black widows are inherently evil. Those ugly webs, that Darth Maul color scheme ... they seem like they don't really deserve to be part of nature. They are chaos and menace and destruction and death. Also, scorpions. One time I watched a nature show about scorpions and had nightmares.

And cancer.

Our good friend H, my husband's first counselor in the elders' quorum, has just been diagnosed with a relapse. When we first met him he was battling a growth in his sinuses. Now it's in his chest cavity, a soft-tissue tumor that is attacking his bones. He's hurting a lot. It's supposed to be incurable. They can fight it, but most likely this is what will eventually take him. Today he meets with his doctors to make a treatment plan.

I wonder if Lucifer spent some time on one of the creation teams before he was cast out. It's hard to make sense of this any other way.