Frenemy! or Lets all dance the Tarantella!

  Frenemy! It is a funny word or more like the mixture of two exact opposite of words.  It is defined as an enemy pretending to be your best friend.  Hmmmm?  Well, I found a frenemy in an unexpected place today.  The replanting of a Pineapple Sage cutting meant I needed a larger flower pot.  A stack of pots was sitting next to the water faucet so I reached down to take the largest one that just happened to be the bottom of the stack of five.  After lifting the four smaller pots, I never even looked in the chosen one.  I assumed it was still just as empty as when I stacked the pots several days ago.  I was wrong.  Deep down under the smaller clay pots sat an eight-legged critter!  Just as I was lifting the potting soil sack to fill the pot, I noticed some beady eyes staring up at me!  Eight long legs and eight beady eyes all rolled up in a hairy body, the Wolf Spider dared me to put my hand down in that container!  It was not having any part of this bit of being buried beneath a gallon or so of dirt!  How humiliating would that be?  So I sat the sack back on the ground and pondered just what to do with my new friend/enemy.

  The Wolf Spider is not one that bothers me a whole lot.  I have dozens upon dozens of them roaming about the gardens.  They can be classified as my friends simply by the number of bugs they eat. They will bite and give you reason enough to be wary from that point forward.  I have been bitten on several occasions purely by accident. I have either grabbed ahold to one while weeding or stepped on one while traipsing about the garden while barefoot.  It is painful..quite painful but not deadly so I try to say that I have learned my lesson. Today, it was easy.  I just needed to empty the spider out of the flower pot and in a more desirable place.  I figured that this one would be far happier near the wood pile!  There it could find lots of bugs and get fat and happy.

  At least my Wolf Spider does not seem to have any dire legends attached to it like one of its cousins.  In Italy, there is a Wolf Spider that is referred to as the Tarantula Spider (not to be confused with a Tarantula!).  Anyway, long ago this Wolf Spider's bite was blamed for the dreaded disease Tarantism.  Part of the remedy was a special dance the Tarantella.  Weird, huh?  Anyway, it turns out that the bite of this Wolf Spider is no more dangerous that the bite of my Wolf Spider...painful but not causing Tarantism.  Tarantism, by the way, is defined as a psychological illness characterized by the extreme impulse to dance....hmmm?  Perhaps my Wolf Spider does cause this!  I sure do a dance occasionally when I find one unexpectedly!