Spider Bite

In 2005, my mother and I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the same year that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast; I just started junior high school. It was my first time being back in South Louisiana since 1998. With my age and inexperience, I did not know what to expect. My neighborhood lost power that Tuesday. I went running around and playing outside with some other kids in the neighborhood, despite the wind and rain. I don't think we were concerned about flying objects, and our parents were preoccupied, but I should have been concerned about the excessive wind, A small spider hit my arm and bit me. I still don't know what kind of spider it was, but I rushed inside to my mom, my arm swelling up like a sasuage. She screamed at me. That brought me back to reality. She decided we had to leave immediately because of something she heard on the radio, so I wrapped my arm up in a towel and got in the car for a long ride in traffic to my grandmother's house in DeRidder. Luckily, I wasn't going into anaphylactic shock and the swelling went down. We spent the next two weeks in DeRidder staring at a TV, hoping our new home, Louisiana as a whole, would not be broken beyond repair.

Citation

“Spider Bite,” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed March 28, 2024, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/45917.

Geolocation