I don’t mind spiders. I don’t want them crawling on my skin, but I’m happy to see them crouched in their webs and waiting to score a hapless fly, a deviant sugar ant. Provided they are doing their job I won’t interfere.
But these days I’m faced with a dilemma. Recently come to live with me is a small spider. He’s in a corner of the kitchen with a low slung clumsy unwieldy web. There are bits beneath him all over the floor. He’s a slob.
When I was a kid I was the bug killer of the family. Siblings were squeamish and would run screaming from rooms at the first sight of anything small and dark and moving fast.
I was the one sent in to deal with insects. It’s not that I liked them, or had some fetish for them. I didn’t want to possess them or put them in glass jars and examine them. No, it was an uneasy truce between the skeeters and I.
For relocation purposes I would find a stick around which to wind the web and with it the prisoner arachnid and run the whole thing outside and fling it into a bush. Even a paper tissue would do, just to pin down and gather up the tiny prey so as to toss it out a window. I was inspired by the praise from family members who would cling to each at a distance from me, and quiver until the operation was over.
Mosquitos, however, suffer a different fate altogether. If I’m bitten or not I will go after them. Like they are Bloods and I’m a Crip, and it’s a matter of principle. I’m an expert at killing mosquitos. The trick, since they can only seem to focus on one event at a time, is to come at them with both hands, in a slicing motion, so that you catch them in the palms of your hands, like you’re saying goodbye to an ex. There were nights in Colombia where all I did was mash mosquitos. We didn’t have cable.
I haven’t yet decided what to do with my teenager of a spider. Today I see him wrapping a fly’s wing in web string. He’s working, so perhaps I’ll let him be.
Image by John Martini©
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