My Nemesis Tula.

If you've never had an encounter with a tarantula, congratulations. You've managed to avoid a most unpleasant experience, the kind that makes your toes curl and your skin prickle. When I was living in Roatan I had a faceoff with a tarantula. Because I picture my tarantula to have been a bitchy, fat, spiteful, female spider, I will refer to her as Tula.

After having watched the entirety of Garth Brooks live in concert on DVD with my mom, I was exhausted and ready to hit the hay. It was a balmy evening as usual and I was already a bit jumpy and nervous about stepping on a random living creature because the crab migration had begun. I was tired and walking to my bedroom when right in front of my foot sat big fat momma Tula. I didn't notice her there until the last second. To this day I thank my lucky stars that I did because either my foot would have been eaten or I would have smushed the hairiest most plump spider in the universe. If I had actually squished Tula, I'm sure I would have some weird OCD obsession with wearing a sock on that foot every minute of every day for the rest of my life.

Tula was about 7 inches in diameter and I could see every one of her eyes staring back at me. If I moved a foot to the right, she would shuffle and readjust her body to look at me. Two feet to the left...shuffle shuffle shuffle...there she was, staring at me. I almost threw up from fear that she would pounce on my face at any moment. I was too scared to jump over her because I knew she would jump 4 feet in the air and cling onto my pajamas, catching a free ride into my bed with me.

I screamed for my mom and she came running over with a broom and a bucket. Mom and I were both at the end of the broomstick trying to gently nudge Tula into the bucket without causing her to sprint towards us. She wouldn't budge. I'm sure that if we had put some real force into it we could have moved her but we didn't want to take the risk of her darting towards us or walking up the handle to where our hands were. This would have resulted in one or both of us fainting, and then Tula would have had a free for all with our limp bodies. After several failed attempts of trying to get her into the bucket, we stopped to rethink our strategy.

We wanted nothing more to do with Tula. We especially didn't want to anger her to the point where she would feel cornered. Our idea was to call my sister's boyfriend at the time, who was a local Honduran guy that knew what was what. He came over half an hour later, walked into the house, up the stairs to my room, picked up Tula by a leg, walked back downstairs, out the door and across the lawn. He put fat Tula in the grass and she just slowly walked off into the night. Great, I thought. She would just do a lap around the garden and then come back to guard my bedroom door again.

Tula returned to me, but only in my dreams. In the end she always pounces on my face. My experience living in Honduras was filled with Tula-like stories. There was the time when I woke up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and upon my return to bed I found a rather large centipede in the fold of my sheet. There was also the time (and this will sound like some kind of urban legend) when I got out of the shower and dried my face with a crunchy towel. It turns out there was a scorpion clinging onto my fluffy fresh towel, and I had just exfoliated my face with its body.

A tarantula saw into my soul that day so many years ago. The result of this is that my biggest fear and archenemy remains the spider. Scorpion, centipede, bat, iguana, crab, barracuda. None of these measure up to Tula.

This is why they scare me.