We have a Charlotte’s Web situation going on over here. Minus the dramatic rat, the world’s greatest pig, a farmer, and a bunch of other characters I can’t remember. Mostly, I guess I involuntarily have acquired an outdoor pet spider which has deterred me from sitting on my porch. I miss it.
For two weeks now, Charlotte (or Charles—I do not know) has been the last thing I see at night when I draw the blinds and retire upstairs. Or when, out of morbid curiosity, I open the blinds to see if it’s back for another night. It is. Somewhere in the evenings, this dang arachnid comes out from wherever it spends the day hiding, and begins its evening job of spinning a web. Once the foreman blows the whistle and its night’s work is done, it disappears who knows where for the day. I keep waiting for a profound message to become legible, and am positive I’ll be rewarded for the generosity of spirit I show by letting the spider live another day.
Note: My compliments go out to the designer of the original book cover for making Charlotte the Spider so visually inoffensive. Unlike all the companies marketing pest control.
While I might like people who don’t share my aversion to spiders, I don’t completely trust them. A former coworker I really liked was a friend to all living creatures, shared the phrase “Onward and upward!” often, and knew exactly when Mercury was in retrograde. One day I lost my composure over a spider in our office and wanted to, um, remove the thing in a permanent, lethal sort of way. Lynda interceded, told us that “Spiders are bringing us messages,” and we should never kill them. My thought was, “Well, that explains a lot about my life.”
Speaking of spiders, on my first housesitting stint in Southern California, I found myself trying to acclimate to how isolated the house and property felt after dark. I’m no stranger to living and traveling alone, including in some sketchy situations, and knew enough to avoid true crime shows or anything more intense than, for example, Charlotte’s Web. I’m no dummy. And yet, I knew my gift of an imagination—a gift surpassed only by my ability to sniff out gas leaks*—could easily run away with itself.
What we humans are good at is distracting ourselves, and I was trying very hard to do just that. It’s like what we all do when trapped in an MRI machine. As your nose itches in the most fascinating of ways, and it suddenly feels incredibly important that you stretch your wrist or move body parts you always take for granted, you find inner reserves of strength by repeating the phrase “Mind over matter.”
One of those nights, I was puttering around, staying busy, and trying to tamp down welling fears of a creeper watching me from outside the ginormous sliding glass doors. Or peeking in a crack between the blinds and the window sill. As random songs are wont to do, “I Dreamed a Dream” from the Broadway musical Les Miserables popped into my mind. But suddenly this song didn’t just feel random. It felt downright sinister as this line repeated in my imaginative brain.
“But the tigers come at night,
With their voices soft as thund-ah…”
It’s not like I spend a lot of time in my real life being afraid of tigers. It’s just that the thought of anything unwelcome coming at night and in unfamiliar settings is disconcerting. To distract myself and prior to this realization, I thought I’d be clever by swapping in a word that came close but didn’t quite rhyme with “tiger.” What I came up with was “spider,” making the new first line as follows:
“But the spiders come at night…
In my very humble opinion, this swap was worse than the original. Because, unlike tigers in Southern California, spiders can and do and did come at night. And no matter how rigorously I tried to squash this line much like I’ve squashed messages right out of dozens, nay hundreds, of spiders in my life, it looped. And looped. The harder I tried not to think of it, I thought of it.
You may be getting the idea that I loathe spiders, despite the leniency I’m currently showing to my current “pet” spider. I come by the loathing honestly given that I grew up in the days before pest control and we therefore had an annual summer collection of twenty-seven huge barn spiders to admire on our deck. Google these spiders at your own risk. Also, to make money during my high school and early college years, my family and I collected insects for biological weed control. This is a story for another day, but think of it as early gold prospecting minus the rugged glamour and all the murdering which happened over prospectors’ claims. And add way more spiders invading your personal space and your dreams at night.
This early overexposure to spiders means I can overreact to spiders. But sometimes it’s warranted. Decades ago at a family reunion, fifteen of us cousins rummaged up three inner tubes and headed off for a river float trip. Due to the poor cousin-to-tube ratio, most of us ended up walking between bends of what ended up being more of a snaking creek.
After one of these portages, I noticed my sister, Jess, had a brown spider the size of a golf ball ON HER BARE BACK. She was standing in approximately 20” of water, when I shrieked “Go under, Jess!” Much like telegrams of old, fewer words are better when a) You’re paying per alphabetic letter or b) You’re delivering a message as urgent as this. She’s my big sister and big sisters don’t really like it when younger sisters tell them what to do. Hence, my surprise when she obeyed without question.
Submerging her body in the shallow water, she thrashed like I think an alligator thrashes when they are trying to drown their prey. Then she stood up, looking panic-stricken. IT WAS STILL THERE. My command of “Go under, Jess!” was repeated, this time even more urgently. She dropped and thrashed about even more impressively. That last set of contortions seemed to do the trick and the spider was sent downstream to take whatever message it was delivering to a more receptive audience.
Later, I was reflecting on this experience, touched that my sister trusted me so much that she’d obeyed me without hesitation. Turns out, that wasn’t it at all. “If you could’ve seen your face, you would’ve done whatever you said,” she told me matter-of-factly. Well. I see. And here I thought we were having a sisterly break-through. Even if her trust in me was (is?) questionable, I suppose there’s something to celebrate about having an expressive face.
At some point, this episode with my sister and my fears of tigers/spiders at night might be worth digging into with some really extensive counseling, despite what I shared last week about quitting self-help. For now, I’ll let my very own Charlotte/Charles keep its night job, trusting that its message will be something more profound than “SOME PIG.” I’ve got bigger fish to fry, like keeping my face expressive. And hoping that Mercury stays out of retrograde. Or in retrograde. Whichever is the desirable state. And I’ve got a lot of wondering to do about what critical messages I may have missed over a lifetime of squashing spiders.
Isn’t life cool, and aren’t people and fears fascinating? See you in the next one…
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*When it comes to identifying and reporting gas leaks, I’m three for four. Not bad.
Fun to read! 👍🏼
Glad to see Emily changing it up and keeping that pet spider.
I like to catch and release whenever possible, except those well behaved jumping spiders that we allow inside to regulate bugs in the kitchen. It's farm living.
Tom Sawyer had that urge to scratch, like a person in an MRI.