When it became apparent that my aging aunt could no longer care for herself, she offered to let us use her savings to turn her basement into an apartment. In this way, she could remain in her home, and in exchange for free rent, we could take care of her. Since she refused to leave during construction, we were forced to live in the basement with our 5 children while the renovations were taking place.

It's important to understand at this point that her basement had been resident-free for several decades…human residents that is.

Well we got to work to try to make the place as homey as possible and I had almost convinced myself that artificial light was just as serviceable as natural light. Then one day our son came home from school and announced matter-of-factly, “Mom, we live underground…like worms.” Though I was forced to agree with his assessment, I still tried to convince myself that things could be worse…and then they became so.

You've got to know that since my sister fell down the basement stairs as a child, right into a nest of black widow spiders, I have been a textbook arachnophobiac. The first spider arrived on my pillow during the night. As my husband was trying to peel me off the ceiling he laughingly said “it's just a little one!” I assured him that if it was large enough to identify as a spider, it was too big and ordered him to immediately call an exterminator. He declined on the grounds that calling an exterminator would be the equivalent to killing a fly with a ground-to-air-missile .

Though the spiders continued to reclaim their former territory, an exterminator was never called until the night we were sitting on the floor watching a movie and we suddenly got a glimpse of something as it ran under the couch. I asked my husband what that was, and he answered ashen-faced, “I don't know, but it had to duck to get under the couch!”

Since four of our children were sleeping on a mattress in the next room, it became critical that we find, and eliminate whatever creature it was. My husband handed me the broom and told me that when he lifted the couch, I was to beat it to death. Things didn't exactly go as planned. When the couch was lifted we gazed upon what appeared to be a scorpion with a great bulb for a tail that had black and yellow stripes around it and I solemnly swear it was snarling at me. When I froze in terror, my husband was forced to flip the couch across the room, grab the broom from me and start attacking it without mercy. When he realized the broom was merely bouncing off the thing, my husband quickly scooped it up onto the broom, ran to the bathroom, and dumped it in the toilet. When, after several flushings, it was still doing the backstroke, my husband finally broke down and called the exterminator. It was quickly identified as a “sand puppy.” Why anyone would give such an adorable name to such a hideous creature is beyond me.

Yes, home is what you make of it, but just because you live underground, you don't have to let large unfriendly insects make it theirs.