Muffet and Co.

We live in a house full of spiders. In all shapes and sizes, they're everywhere but don't generally make a nuisance of themselves. They mind their own business and thank us to do the same.

It's likely that there are so many because we have a large and bountiful garden with flowers and fruit trees that is surely home to a wide variety of critters that would otherwise overtake us. So, in that sense, spiders are good. They serve a purpose. Inside, it's a little harder to justify their occasional appearance, but even then we are tolerant, usually either shooing them out of doors or just ignoring them and letting them have their little corner web. Favorite spots are predictable: corner of the shower where it's nice and damp; that lower shelf in the pantry that gets little disruption; large houseplant; under a bed or sofa.

We are not paranoid about them because they've not proven to be aggressive. I'm sensitive to bug bites, so I'd be the first one raising hell if I suspected there was an eradication campaign to raise. This isn't to say that I haven't on occasion awoken in the morning to find a suspicious bug bite on a too-temptingly offered leg or arm. I know the difference between a mosquito and spider bite. I can handle a spider bite. They last longer and are more about pain than itching, but at least it's not that incessant itching of the mosquito bite that makes you want to take your own life. Still, if the incidents became more regular than a couple a year, I'm sure we'd all sit up and take better notice. As it is, sharing room and board seems to be the easier option.

I have, occasionally found the questionable intruder. Specifically, once in the garage and once in the garden, I came across a Black Widow. Not one to mince words, I took matters into my own hands, right quick, dousing with venom and then smashing with the heaviest hiking boot I could find, for good measure. One feels mightily olympic on such occasions, let me tell you. "I have killed deadly vermin. I am invincible." Still, the encounters have been so conspicuously few and far between that our view of the arachnid family is more a conspiratorial one. "You get those mosquitoes now, y'hear?"

We're coming up on garden spider season soon. It's a yearly festival involving our largest participants, and much learning on our part. It took years, but we finally got a copy of the treaty ingrained into our little noggins. Come sundown, the garden no longer belongs to us. We leave the premises and assemble indoors, to leave the little guys to their art. In turn, they build the largest webs I've ever encountered, stringing them from tree to tree, big as banners, and rid the night of anything careless enough to flutter by.

If you're afraid of spiders, garden spider season is the very makings of a horror story because not only are the webs fantastically enormous, hard to see, easy to run into, and creepy on your skin; the garden spiders that make them are only ever around during this season, and unlike the small, unremarkable indoor spiders that we see all year long, garden spiders are like the blue whale of the spiders around here. They are huge and with their striped markings look malevolent, tame though they are. As I said, it took us all a while to figure out that they were more than happy to share our living space with us if we would simply abide by the rules, and stop walking into their little masterpieces, dammit.

Today, a spider visited me in my room. A small guy, he seemed to be staking out a spot on my book shelves to make a home. I'm tolerant, not stupid, so I smashed him. I had no choice. I could tell by his size that he'd be quick if I tried to shoo him outside. It's not so much that he would have scurried away as I would have had him on my hand and walking to the door, and he likely would have bungee jumped off my palm and complicated everything by having me spend the next thirty minutes crawling around to locate him again, etc., etc.

The one I encountered outside the garage, I left alone, though I warned him that I was coming back with a load of laundry and limited visibility so, y'know... scoot over.