Along came a spider
Easy Does It
The creepy crawly used my hair as a walking path last night. Just a wispy tickle, mind you, but a determined thousand-legger spider made its way through my deep human underbrush.
It’s happened before, but only at night and only when I exit the front door in a rush, without looking. The exit from my own house is so familiar that I forget a spider has been on the night shift constructing a web to be proud of. Without looking, I dash outside, then stop as I find myself being Saranwrapped by the flimsiest of all packaging.
Because nothing is really there? My imagination working on overtime? Wrong! I have met the enemy and he is a spider.
The strange feeling of being Christmas wrapped by a creepy crawler gives me, well, the creepy crawlies! Is it better not to see it or not to cross the path taken by this creature of the night?
In my defense, out of habit, I began to duck without really knowing I was ducking. A subconscious lowering of the head because I knew something was there, just outside my front door, doing push-ups in my hair.
Then looking up in the front porch light, I meet my tormentor face to face, or pincers to head, or whatever, because staring back at me wasn’t really a face but little beady cartoon eyes.
The big, fat thousand-legger spider was staring back at me from the home it had built for itself just outside my front door with the help of one workaholic smaller spider laborer.
My spider has been building doorblocking webs nearly all summer. They’re gone in the morning, then back again by evening around nine or ten o’clock. Under the cover of darkness this big hairy guy is skilled in construction, a regular manual laboring kind of bug, building and tearing down by sunup, so proud to capture guests who drop in for dinner. A magnificent, intricate, triangular, silvery eating establishment.
The nightly web hangs down so low I get a snout-full of spider webby-goo headon, when I forget that it’s there. That big hairy maitre de just squats there, not moving nor saying a word, just sort of waiting for the fly, the prey, or me. “Live and laugh now,” I silently say to this intruder, “because I’ll get you in the morning when I can see what I’m doing and you can’t.”
Joke’s on me. Bug face is outa-here in the morning. Not that I’m a coward, but porch lights tend to distort things that don’t exactly go bump in the night.
In the morning, in bright sunlight bringing with it normalcy and warmth to the world outside my door, the hideous spider web and its builder are long gone, vanished like a bad dream, only to reappear by nightfall.
Where does it go in daylight? The simple answer is anywhere it wants to. This creature’s home away from home is known only to nature.
There is some comfort in my doogle search: “There are only a few spiders in the world that are truly poisonous to some animals but only to a few to humans.”
Want to know more? Can I take it? Espe- cially when I open my front door at night? For one, spiders are not insects. Can you spell arachnids? That might not interest anyone but a spider, but just so you know, it means they have fangs and devour their food from the inside out. Their fangs are used only to inject venom.
That’s comforting – I think! There will be no venom injecting around my front door!
Because I feel a responsibility to entertain this unwelcome night visitor when the moon is full and my porch light is out, I must remember to duck when dashing outside.
It is only mildly comforting to know that our September neighbor can belong to only two varieties of North American spiders that are known to be poisonous. Please stand up and take a bow, messieurs black widow and faithful companion brown recluse spider.
oemind me to ask for some form of Ia when leaving my house after dark when encountering a web-building, multilegged, really ugly porch guest with attitude you wouldn’t believe.
yrdezdoesit@comcast.net