Ugliness and Horror

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.