The Daddy Longlegs are back. One flew in the door a few days ago. He ended up in the bathroom near the window. The next day, as I stepped from the shower, there were six or eight on the bedroom walls. As I type, there is one hanging on to the corner of the monitor wondering, I suppose, why it's so bright this time of night. Soon, there will be so many that their curiosity will wane and their nuisance value drive me to the closet for the vacuum cleaner. I pretend each year that I won't end up doing that. I also pretend that they're good for the house because they eat mosquitos. But, there's nothing to substantiate that except that fact that everyone says so. I think it's a legend developed to give them purpose. They're flies, but they don't fly well. There's something unsportsmanlike about swatting them. They just move around every so often. They don't buzz. They just fill the house once a year from God knows where, and before long they're gone. Not before they've become a nuisance, but gone nonetheless. In the mean time, they eat mosquitos.

I lived in a creek side house twenty years ago where visitors from the south of France ended up in a spare bedroom for a few days. After they rested from the flight, around ten that night they walked into the kitchen to find something to eat. The kitchen had a large light box covered with a sort of grayish mass of moving Daddy Longlegs. The next thing we knew they were screaming, hands in the air, running out the back door. To think they had come all this way only to be swarmed and eaten by huge American insects. To us, it was only that time of year when the Daddy Longlegs moved indoors for a while, ate mosquitos and disappeared. Reluctantly, we went to the closet, pulled out the vacuum cleaner, disrupted a local life cycle, and the Frenchmen stepped gingerly over the threshold.

I suppose one could feel the same way about frogs.