Don’t Poke a Spider with a Stick:
A Story of Waiting and Wriggling
Waiting in Limbo
The hardest part is the waiting. Julia and I are poised for our new
life in Australia, but we remain tethered to our old one in America, held fast
by a single document: the Australian permanent residency visa. Every
conversation with friends and officials assures us of its inevitability, yet as
the great Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
We are both so acutely ready to leave that the delay has become a
genuine ache. It’s like that infamous viral video of a dog, a prized treat
balanced on its nose, forced to hold perfectly still until the moment of
blissful, permitted gobbling. Now, I understand the dog’s exquisite agony.
We haven’t been idle, though. We’ve meticulously researched,
planned, and systematically dismantled the major obstacles to our departure.
Selling the House: After interviewing
a ‘magnificent seven’ of realtors, we finally secured an agent to sell our
Portland home. This was a complex calculus, weighing various skill sets against
considerable fees. U.S. tradition often dictates that the seller covers the buyer’s
agent fee, a cost that, combined with our own agent’s commission, will be
substantial – some 5% of our sale. The unfortunate truth is that we will likely
not recoup the investment we’ve lovingly poured into our home over the past
five years. The lucky new owner will inherit a low-carbon-footprint,
meticulously maintained haven – at our expense.
Shipping Our Lives: We’ve selected a
moving company and curated the items for the voyage to Australia. This was no
small feat, separating our 35 years in America into ‘must-go’ and ‘must-stay’
piles. The decision was simplified slightly by electrical incompatibility – most
U.S.-plugged items are useless down under. The greater challenge was the
emotional weight of our possessions. Since we won’t have a permanent home
immediately, we had to be ruthless, avoiding the expensive folly of shipping
furniture we may not need. Many cherished items will be left behind.
The Great Cull: The residue of our
lives – the things we can’t take – will be handled by an estate sales company.
We interviewed several before choosing one who agreed to a 35% commission, a
commitment to donate all unsold items to charity, and, most importantly, the
promise to leave our home utterly empty, swept clean for the final sale.
Don’t Poke a Spider with a Stick
As the machinery of our departure grinds forward, Julia and I
continue our normal American rhythms. Recently, we joined friends for a
heartfelt dinner party celebrating Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead). To the
uninitiated, this observance might sound morbid, but it is, in fact, a
beautiful, vibrant tradition where food, stories, and laughter are shared to
remember and honor, lost loved ones. It is, to my mind, infinitely more
meaningful than the manufactured Halloween.
During the evening, one of our hosts – an avid collector of
arachnids – offered to introduce us to his favorite (and largest) resident:
Coconut, a truly impressive tarantula.
He led us down into his home’s darkened basement, a room dedicated
to his prized collection of creepy-crawlies. We watched as he carefully removed
the lid of Coconut’s large plexiglass enclosure. The tarantula stood
motionless, a formidable, velvet-black silhouette.
This is where common sense fled.
Our host, seeking to elicit the creature’s legendary, graceful
movement, decided to gently poke it with a small paintbrush.
Instead of a graceful display, the spider launched. It bolted up the
handle of the brush with terrifying speed, causing our host to yelp and leap
back. In the shock, he involuntarily flicked the paintbrush skyward, and
Coconut, the enormous tarantula, arced through the air and landed silently on
the concrete floor.
Suddenly, we were trapped in a dark, humid basement, surrounded by
glass cases of crawling things, on the Day of the Dead, sharing the space with
a loose, dinner-plate-sized tarantula. Julia, whose spider phobia is profound,
executed a perfect, simultaneous maneuver: she froze rigid as a marble statue,
then launched herself into a full sprint out of the room. Even our host,
usually the picture of arachnid serenity, looked pale and deeply uncomfortable.
After a few tense minutes, our host expertly and safely wrangled
Coconut back into its enclosure, and the world tilted back onto its axis.
The immediate, simple lesson was clear: Don’t poke a spider with a
stick. You may think you know the likely outcome, you may have the best
intentions, but you never truly know what unpredictable chaos you might
unleash.
And so, it is with our move to Australia. We have done all the
planning, all the difficult preparations. Now, we wait for the final, sudden,
unpredictable action that will launch us into our new lives.