#and i wrote an enormous text and sent it to the groupchat

[kingslionheart]

plot twist the confrontation that was triggering me a lot actually ended well

[bomberqueen17]

adventures from the family groupchat

I have three sisters so a while back Mom started a group text that included all of us. An exciting upgrade was a couple years ago when my father finally got his own smartphone, after years of having all his input filtered through Mom. So now the family groupchat is the four daughters, Mom, and Dad. Normally it’s used to send photos of the various niblings doing Significant Stuff around, but occasionally we get something great like the youngest niece posing artistically in front of Dad’s latest demolition project.

[Image description: small blonde girl in bright cheerful clothing strikes a coy, vampy pose leaning against a garbage can in front of a mostly-demolished cinder block building full of neat piles of junk.]

(One could almost imagine she’d done this with the power of her mind, knowing her.)

Anyhow, yesterday Dad sent a photo, which I will decline to share here, of a gloriously majestic enormous wolf spider sitting on the wainscoting in the kitchen, next to the kitchen bookshelf. “Spring has arrived. A visitor to our kitchen this morning. Mom at first thought it was one of the toy bugs, but it’s just looking up Easter recipes in the cook books.”

Various of us reacted in different ways, and I went on with my life after doing my part (looking up the spider’s Latin classification to verify it was the species I’d thought), and it was a bit later that my youngest sister got to the message.

She wrote asking if they’d set him a place at the dinner table.

In the meantime, my mind had gone a very long distance from this chat, and I had been discussing Passover seders with someone, so I immediately assumed this was someone talking about, of course, the Prophet Elijah, so I had to go poke the notification to figure out why my sister of all people was chiming in on Passover commentary (we are Catholic by upbringing, so).

It took me some backtracking to figure out she was talking about the spider. 

I made a joke about it in the family groupchat but I’m the only one in the family who knows anything about Passover so it went unappreciated, so I’m sharing the setup here at least where someone might be amused. 

I AM A DELIGHT also, in looking up wolf spiders, I discovered that they are not in fact signs of spring; they live more than one year, so this glorious specimen likely overwintered somewhere. Then I got distressed, to Dude, wondering where spiders GO in the winter and DON’T THEY GET COLD. He was like, uh they’re fine, don’t freak out. But a part of me wants to knit tiny spider sweaters, so let’s be glad I never learned to knit.