I say it’s a ‘love hate’ relationship but I suspect it’s a bit more of a ‘love to hate’ relationship. Granted there are few people in the world who see a spider heading towards them and are awash in tides of love and joy, but this is about me, not them – the glory-hogs!
Spiders and I have an unwritten agreement that, should they come into our cottage, they are automatically wavering the right to life. They are depressed spiders. Spiders who long to end it all in this creepy crawly world. Spiders who’ve come asking for my aid in moving on to that large, dewy web in the sky. And I am only too ready to oblige! (And if they are a particularly poisonous spider I often do it with a song in my heart and some extra wrist action with the shoe or spray, free of charge!)
Besides venom, which any sane person is spooked by, their good looks don’t appeal to me either. Most especially why do they need all those extra legs and eyes? They’re not impressing anyone! And why do they have to move like they do? All squiggly like. Someone told me it was so you could identify what it was that you were looking at. Like I’d see something clinging to the curtain and be swept away in a fit of doubt as to whether it was a spider or a tenacious elephant! (In which case I’d need a bigger shoe…)
My problem comes when it’s a big furry spider. Contrary to popular reaction, I don’t automatically reach for whatever hard spider-thumping material I can find. I suspect this comes from previous experiences where squishing a large spider meant that sooner or later I have to lift the object and clean out the spider jam left behind. *Trauma*
So I started catching them in Jars. And here in lies my problem. Once inside the jar I’m never sure exactly what to do with it. I could release it into the wild but then I feel that I’m not upholding my end of the deal, not to mention I know that, that spidey will then go off, become a real tramp and give birth to millions of babies who will all find their way back to me in some karmic tangle I never wanted to be a part of in the first place!
Yet I don’t particularly want to spray poison into the jar as that just seems like I’m not giving the thing a sporting chance. (Now if it was on the curtain pretending to be an elephant, that would be a different story…)
So I end up with a big spider in a jar. Now for most people that makes for a sleepless night, perhaps with worry that they’ll get up for a midnight snack and open the wrong jar and end up spreading something a lot crunchier then peanut butter.
For me though I seem to get hit with a warped maternal instinct. Before you know it I’m hunting crickets and other spiders to feed my kiddo! I show it off to other, slightly less enthusiastic, people and take too many pics that I then post on blogs for people to wonder over.
We actually once had a tarantula. A Chilean rose named Baby. (This was a consciously sadistic choice on my part as I’d love to tell new people, “Oh come meet Baby!” and they all think it’s a parrot or one of those little rats that Paris Hilton always has stashed away in her luggage.)
Baby once escaped over the Christmas holidays. (Knocked the tank lid off, who knew they were so strong?). For ten days going to the bathroom at night was a trial by fire thing. What to do if the tile you step on is suddenly fuzzy and moves? Luckily we did find her again, on my side of the bed, and she was recaptured. (This happened while we were awake as the story may have had a different ending otherwise). We later swapped her for a nice fuzzy, hay eating chinchilla.
So anyway now I have a smaller version, in a cheese jar, in the kitchen, patiently waiting to be fed its smaller brethren. You know I think I need to get out more…
^_^
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