too crabby in the morning?

If you refuse to let my people go, I will strike all your territory with frogs.  The river will swarm with frogs.  They will go up, enter your palace and go into your bedroom, onto your bed.  They will enter the houses of your servants and your people and go into your ovens and kneading bowls.  The frogs will climb all over you, your people and your servants.

OK.  So, we are missing a few elements to make this truly biblical.  No chosen people in slavery.  No heart-hardened pharaoh.  And no frogs.

But the theme is there. 

It is time for our annual plague of land crabs.  Or mollos, as my neighbors call them.  Those one-gloved Jack Dempseys waving their comic claw in the air like a drunken campesino at the local cantina. 

The rains must flush them from the hiding holes.  And we have had plenty of flushing lately.

Last night, nine of the dark-bodied crabs were huddled around my screen in two groups.  5 to 4.  As if the Supreme Court was caucusing on my patio.  Clearly an augury of the fate of Obamacare.  But neither the 5 nor the 4 were willing to provide any portends other than Delphic ambiguity.  That I can get from the newspaper.

This morning the screen door was covered with crabs that had undoubtedly mistaken the mesh for a climbing wall.  Apparently, that is what crabs do after a full night of eating mangoes and mixing DNA.

In the four years I have witnessed this phenomenon, I have never seen this many mollos.  There must have been at least fifty just on the patio. 

At night I can hear them attempting to climb up the screen door.  Almost always ending in a distinctive shell-cracking fall.

There is no Moses to shoo them out of our lives.  Time will do that.  In a day or two, their numbers will start to dwindle.  By the end of the month, they will merely be the potential for another post in eleven months.

For now, I simply like to watch their Jerry Lewis-ish tarantula impressions.