My husband's house, which is really a giant former 1] barn, 2] factory for publishing a Seventh Day Adventist journal [now published elsewhere] is a land of dust and mysteries. Flies collect on the windowsills by the hundreds, source unknown. Either there are bodies hidden somewhere, or flies come inside seeking warmth [by no means is this building weather-sealed] and lay down their lives on the window sills in a vain endeavor to escape.
With the abundance of flies, one would think I would welcome the occasional spider. I was talking with my humanitarian [or creature-itarian] friend Karen one time about my horror of spiders. She goes, "What about Charlotte?" "Karen, that was fiction." I always wanted to ask her, if she had a bacterial infection, would she refuse to take antibiotics?
As a child I slept in bunk beds. Two feet from the ceiling, you open your eyes to see a spider lowering down towards your face. Do you sit up? No, that puts you dangerously close to the spider. Do you roll away? No, then you roll out of a top bunk onto the floor. You lie there, paralyzed . . .
Why do spiders love bathtubs?
So, I'm clear about my conviction that spiders are fair game on my turf, i.e. indoors, yet I feel a horror on killing them. I'm sure that part of my feeling about spiders is shaped by associating them with killing. Especially when I try to smack them near the ceiling with a broom and they fall somewhere behind the furniture, free to scurry away and attack me later. I once came up with the strategy of applying duct tape facing outwards on the broom so the spider would stick to it. Doesn't work. Spiders are coated with silicon or teflon or grease.
It's me or the spiders. But that little doubt: is this wrong? To snuff out callously a life that I can't put back . . . That doubt fuels the sense of horror I feel. Anyway, if I could put back the life of the spider, I wouldn't make a spider. Maybe a pony.
That's probably why God is God and I'm not.
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2 comments:
Interesting that I have developed an affection for certain house spiders over the last 10 years. The "giant European" house spider, the one that I characterize with big army boots, I've learned comes out of the interior wall spaces to our ceilings, walls, or bathtubs, is actually looking for a mate in the fall. Who among us has not made some stupid mistake when twitterpated (drugged) by hormones? Maybe I rose to the heroic role by my son's arachnaphobia, but I learned to capture them with a cup, slide a piece of stiff paper under it, and escort the little creature outdoors. Where I am certain that his or her Swiss army boots head right back for some little entrance to the crawlspace and come out again. If I find one in the bathtub, I give it a ladder of TP or a towel to get out and find a way back into the heating vents. Usually the house absorbs them. Note that all this is rational and under controlled circumstances. If I were startled by a strange one in my face, I would react with horror and a life might be lost, with instant regret.
-Your sister
I did for a while last year get "into" the glass + a card method of escorting spiders outside. I tend to use this more rational approach when I'm not startled and when the outdoors is closer. I guess I sort of slid back into the irrational reaction recently.
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