SCORPION

 I grew up in western Washington State, where there are no ticks or chiggers or poisonous snakes or poisonous spiders… And in the mid 1990’s my wife and children and I moved to the Missouri Ozarks. Here there are ticks and chiggers and copperheads and rattlesnakes and cottonmouths and black widows and brown recluses. Most of the spiders we see in our house are brown recluses, and I don’t even walk across our yard during the warm seasons without hurrying to take a shower afterwards.

When we first moved here, our kids wanted to set up the tent and camp in the woods next to our apartment building. So three-year-old Glory and her older brothers put together a neat little camp site among the countless oak trees and out of sight of civilization. But when darkness fell, they came home. It was too spooky out there.

For two hours they watched television before getting ready for bed. Then Glory got off the couch and went to take a bath. Andy happened by the bathroom while Glory was in the tub, and saw a little scorpion crawling out of her clothes and across the floor. We captured it in a jar, and found later that it’s the kind of scorpion that would have made Glory awfully sick if it had stung her. This critter had been on Glory, in her clothing, for over two hours!

I was so thankful to the scorpion for not stinging our little daughter that I drove a couple miles away and let the critter go free.

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