The tangled web we leave.

We have left deadly Spider Cabin at Loch Lyme Lodge in New Hampshire and are happy to be home where our dutiful cats ensure there is a running spider deficit (thankfully). Praise cats and their undying need to chase things that creep and crawl. We continue to pull spiders out of our luggage. A dead spider surprised me on our way home as he came flying to a tiled grave on the Dunkin’ Donuts floor after breathing his last spider breath in my wallet. Ew. Yuck. Hate spiders. My Mr. Husband became the great spider hero as he saved me night after night from certain spider death. Arachnids beware! We were not thrilled with our lodgings.

New Hampshire was beautiful. It was beyond so. The incredible time we experienced there for the Sibley-Stewart-Stevenson family gathering completely blanketed the stupid spiders at the lodge, which had clearly seen better days. Days without so many creatures bedding down with its guests. Seriously, get Mr. Husband a leather fedora and a leather whip—he was on continuous patrol as my protectorate. When not patrolling the futon that I called “Mr. Lumpy Bones” or chasing bugs out of the shower, we did enjoy our time on the dotted-lawn-chair-lawn and our time candoodling in the canoe on the loch.

While passed out on the plane, drooling on myself and gritting my teeth as I tried to sleep with one of those neck pillows that seem only to push one’s head forward instead of providing true slumbering comfort, I woke to find a package of peanuts in my lap. This tiny package of airplane peanuts reminded me in a very sweet and salty way of how kind, caring, and considerate Mr. Husband is while watching over me. He knows how I love that package of, like, twenty peanuts that help plane passengers forget for about seven seconds that they’re trapped way up high in the sky. I live for those peanuts and am disappointed when I find myself on a plane where they’ve removed that salty little comfort from the skies. This simple act of obtaining my twenty peanuts for me while I slept made me think of other little things Mr. Husband does to make my travels sweeter.

Mr. Husband always transports the luggage in and out of the car, in and out of the taxi, and in and out of the shuttle. I am an expert on wheels but terrible with heavy lifting. It is the great moment in my life when I stand back and let the heavy lifting magic happen. Mr. Husband always wears layers on the plane so that his perpetually cold wife can bundle up in his cast-offs. He lets me take up more space than necessary in the exit row seats that we get for his long legs. He holds me when there’s turbulence (I always think we’re about to die). He watches over me and keeps me in continuous care. It is a simple little thing that he can do for me that makes our travels go much smoother. It is a simple little thing that keeps me in constant song and high cheer that then affects him with song and high cheer. It all comes around.

Mr. Husband continued this high level of care as he procured a paper map for me in the airport as he mapped out our travel route from Manchester to Loch Lyme on his fancy electronic GPS map. I sang him songs about how my paper map changed my life while folding in the names of the surrounding cities that sprung up on our path to Spiderville. He continued his great level of care as he fought off the demon spiders that we encountered nightly. We imagined a world filled with wild flowers and leisure by the lake. Who can imagine that they’ll come home to find a giant mother spider with a sack of a zillion babies on her belly ready to burst and eat you alive in your lumpy-bones-futon? Who can imagine that? If you can imagine it, you’d better have a Mr. Husband who has studied in the ways of wifely care. No one likes waking up to creepy crawlies in the bed in the middle of the night.

From this point forward, if anything crawls on me in the middle of the night, it had better by My Mr. Husband. Only. Ever. No Spiders.