This morning on my way out the back door, I was stopped in my tracks by a tattered envelope with an urgent message scrawled across it with a dried-up marker:

WATCH
OUT
SPIDER
USE
FRONT
DOOR

I confess I could not make heads or tails of it.  It might as well have been written in Swahili.  Seriously.  Ladies.  We love you, but we don't understand a word you say.  You speak a different language. 

My bike is right outside, chained to the back stoop, and unless we're talking Kumonga here, I'm not going out of my way.  But like I said, I'm not even sure what the note meant to say. 

It's the orphanage we're talking about here, after all.  So it could mean "be careful not to disturb the gentle spider, who has graced our back passage with her gossamer web," or "yo watch out — this spider will cutchu."  Without punctuation it's impossible to tell.  Is it "WATCH OUT, SPIDER," or "WATCH OUT: SPIDER".   

Either way the note is annoying.  While I can't  really object to the attempt, however flawed, to be informative ("WATCH OUT SPIDER"), you have to admit the "USE FRONT DOOR" is bossy. But without more information (or an enforcer, or evidence of an actual spider somewhere), it's ultimately unpersuasive. 

I checked my impulse to rip the sign down, opened the door and stepped over the threshold without event, closed it behind me, and set off on my day's adventure, unscathed, unspidered.  For the record, though:  a broom works better when dealing with a spider than a dried-up marker and a post-it note. 

The post-its and scrawled notes come in spates around the orphanage — a kind of visual Tourettes fit that spikes once a month.  They are always in dried-up marker, which means whoever's responsible has to scrawl all the harder, and in all-caps to make her point. 

Then we have an imitator in the house.  She doesn't know she's imitating — she's just sort of a natural cistern for memes — but whenever the one starts with the notes, the other isn't far behind.  The latter usually come in the form of needlessly labeling things, a bit like you do when you're studying a foreign language and you post stickies in your target language on everyday objects all around the house, except in this case the target language is the native language. 

I confess I haven't a clue as to what it's about.  Luckily, after a few days and a flurry of post-its which are dutifully ignored, the furor dies down. And things are calm on the sticky front for awhile. 

I guess it's just that time of the month.