I hate spiders. Yes, yes, I know they're very very good for us. They eat all the bugs and what would we do without them. Blah, blah, blah. Yay spiders. I still hate them.
We moved from Minnesota to Arizona when I was six years old. Having never really been around poisonous spiders before, my dad made sure to educate us about the dangers of black widows, which were plentiful in our new area. Don't touch a black widow, don't look at a black widow, don't even think mean thoughts about a black widow, don't put your hands into dark places if you can't tell if there might possibly be a black widow there, if you think a black widow might ever have potentially been in the area then tiptoe carefully and move cautiously. I became convinced that black widows had built a nest in the bottom of my bed and I slept with my legs crossed for weeks so I wouldn't touch a baby spider by accident.
And then came
Kingdom of the Spiders. My parents thought it might be fun to watch since it had been filmed in our town. Yeah, it was really neat for me to see a movie that showed our town completely cocooned in spider webs and everyone killed by hoardes of tarantulas. I started waking up at night, convinced that spiders were crawling in my hair.
Spiders would periodically make their way into the house. Not cute little adorable spiders that you'd be comfortable with seeing in the corner. Not Charlotte, oh no. We'd get
Wolf Spiders the size of your average pomeranian. These are spiders that haul their thousands of babies around on their
backs. These are spiders that are practically mammals. They look like they know what you're thinking and could create an ambush for any potential escape route you might be planning. You can't just smash those bastards, you'd have a stain the size of a saucer on your wall. Once I was in the shower (without my glasses obviously) and I had my foot up on the side of the tub to shave my legs. I felt something fall on my foot and I looked fuzzily down to see my entire foot covered with a wolf spider. I screamed and flung it with my foot and began to flail wildly in the "spider dance" hoping that I hadn't accidently flung it into my hair or something. The screaming made my family come to the bathroom door and were moments away from busting in to see my adolescent nakedness before I assured them I was OK. That spider didn't want to just scare me, it wanted to humiliate me.
For some reason, I thought Washington would have less spiders. When I think of the desert, I think bugs; when I think of the rainforest, I think of, um, I don't know, but not bugs. Turns out, I was completely deluded. This, my friends, is Spiderland. We have spiders everywhere. When weeding the yard, I usually turn up at least two or three spiders per plant (I tried to look up a picture of them on
this site, but the pictures there are the stuff of nightmares, so I gave up). When you look outside you can see the webs in every tree and plant. We have a weeping something tree (I don't know what it is, but the branches hang down) out by our garbage cans and it's a spider tree. There are freaky little spiders all over it and I have to walk by it doing a big chopping scissors motion with my arms or I get a faceful of web. I took the garbage cans out to the curb last week and a branch brushed my head. When I came back in, Andre said, "Uh, hmmm. Why don't you hold still for just a second." I knew. I knew right then I had a spider in my hair. I stood absolutely still because I knew that if I moved, the spider would probably run down my back or something and I would most likely wet myself. Andre captured it and threw it outside and didn't make me look at it. He's a good man.
I don't really know what the moral to this story is. Perhaps it's just a warning to any of you thinking that you might want to move to Washington. Be warned, unless you have a husband who will take care of spiders in your hair, you might want to try Arizona instead.
