The Itsy-Bitsy Spider

When I was very young, I grew up in an AdventureHouse.

(No, not like the kind with a Jungle Room complete with wildcats. Nice try, but your grand illusions cannot make me feel inadequate. My childhood was awesome.)

By AdventureHouse, I mean that it was under construction from when I was born right up through when I moved out.**1 And when I say under construction, I mean I vividly remember using an Army blanket as a door for the bathroom (the one with actual plumbing and a potty - not the outhouse. That had a real door). And stubbing my toe on the hardwood flooring because I couldn't (wouldn't) "pick my damned feet up and stop scuffing around."**2 And when we finally got ceiling tiles, instead of just rigid sheathing insulation.

It was always an adventure.

Because of the state of constant construction under which my childhood home interminably was, there were certain rules we had to follow that other children just didn't have to deal with.

For instance... we weren't supposed to scuff our feet, because we would a) pick up splinters in our tender tootsies**3, b) ruin whatever slippers we might have gotten for Christmas, and then get splinters through them, or c) stub our damned toes on the hardwood flooring because we didn't pick them up to step over the threshold from room to room.

And it wasn't just the interior of the house that was under construction. The outside got lovin's too.

Which meant that we also had rules about How To Enter the Domicile, How To Exit the Domicile, and How To Proceed About The Dooryard. All of the rules were pretty much the same for these three activities.

Thou Shalt, upon crossing the dooryard, approaching the building or disembarking from the building, Abide by the Following Guidelines:

a) Wear a blaze orange hat for optimized visibility.

b) Cover thine head with thine arms, as arms are more replacable than heads.

c) Sing loudly to announce thine presence to yonder working Daddy. 

i) Do not sing "If All The Raindrops Were Lemon Drops And Gum Drops." That song implies a tiny face thrust skyward, which simply begs to be bashed in by any object that may have just made an unplanned departure from the roof. 

d) Do not dawdle in your traversing. Make haste. 

i) Do not make so much haste that you topple over. With your arms wrapped about your head thusly, such a misstep would guarantee a face driven most thoroughly into the gravel.

I told you that story... to tell you this story.

Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in the smoking area outside of my office. (Making a phone call. I do not smoke. I dated one smoker when I was young, and it made me physically ill to encounter his icky-tasting tongue. Not that the rest of him was any less icky for that disgusting habit... just that his tongue was super gross with its smokiness and propensity for being in my mouth.) It's immediately adjacent to the building (the smoking area, that is... not the ex-boyfriend's tongue...), and relatively sheltered from the wind so it's optimized for telephone conversations.

At least... I thought it was.

Until the building started eminating a noise that sounded as though a cordless drill was boring through the sheet metal and attempting to throw itself to its death eight stories down.

I hastened from the area into the adjacent parking lot and completed my phone call there.

But it was upon my reembarkation towards the building that I realized how deeply ingrained my childhood training was.

I had, unknowingly, pulled my arms over my head and begun singing - more loudly than a grown woman should - "The Itsy Bitsy Spider."

**1 As a note: Construction completion did not occur just because I moved out. The house is, in fact, still under construction. And probably will be until we sell it or all die and leave it to the animals.

**2 Dad loved when I scuffed my feet.

**3 Or bunsies. Ask my mother's beloved cat, whom I dragged around by the tail as a toddler. Nothing like a prickly posterior to make you want to move out of the house with the Tiny Schizoid and back down the road to Grandmom's.