I was sitting in a folding chair in my neighbor’s driveway the other evening having a glass of wine with a circle of friends when along came a spider.
It was a large brown spider, really large. It was about two inches long – pretty impressive if you ask me.
My friends’ first reaction was to shriek, “Kill it!”
I jumped up and went to get a closer look.
The large spider was a mama spider, carrying a spider egg sack underneath her.
I remembered, a few months back, another neighbor came across a garden spider egg sack, and someone from a wildlife organization came, poured gas on the egg sack, and lit it on fire.
“There could be hundreds of garden spiders in that sack,” was his reasoning.
It seemed wrong to me.
I have lived in my current home for over 11 years, and we have never gassed a spider egg sack, and we have never been overrun with giant garden spiders either.
So, there I am, wine glass in hand, staring at this really big spider thinking – why.
Why do we have to kill it?
Why do we have to squash something just because we are ignorant to it?
There are only two highly poisonous spiders in our area.
One is the Brown Recluse, which likes to hide and is not giant, and the other one is the Black Widow, which this spider I was staring at was clearly not. Black Widows are bulbous and black, not spindly and brown. This spider was not even a Wolf spider, which packs a mean bite but will not kill anyone.
So, I yell at my friend’s husband not to gallantly squash the mama spider, and I look around for something to transport the mama in.
Of course, there is nothing to put the spider in, nothing except for the wine glass in my hand.
I gulp the wine down and capture the mama in my wine glass. I yell at Mark for a piece of paper to cover the glass with. Why do I yell? Because I just gulped down my very nice glass of wine and now have a giant spider in my glass, of course.
He gets me a post-it.
A post-it.
Really?
So, off I go with my wine glass (filled with a giant spider) and a post-it balanced on top.
I walk halfway around the block where there is a corner of no-man’s land. No one is sure who owns the swath that is over grown and leads to a pond. I figure that is a good place for a mama and her babies.
I am walking with purpose, holding my wine glass at eye level, staring at the mama, and all the while trying to keep the post-it from falling off.
There’s a small drop of red wine in the bottom of the glass. I wish the spider would somehow drink it because she is moving angrily in that glass as I march on.
Several cars pass me. I don’t bother to look up hoping the “if I can’t see them, they can’t see me” childhood reasoning will work because this jaunt is too confusing to explain.
I find a bush to dump the mama spider in and walk back to the neighborhood gathering wondering if maybe the next time people are ignorant of me or my family, they won’t squash us like a bug. Maybe the laws of balance will work in my favor, and what goes around comes around.
Today, I walked my dog Petunia by the spider mama bush and thought, that spider and her babies will make sure that there will be less mosquitoes around here.