By Cathy Russell
I’m afraid of spiders. When we were kids, I had a very conflicted relationship with the National Geographic magazine. Each periodical was eagerly awaited, and yet flipping through
them I always felt a certain level of dread, since so many issues seemed to
feature a full page glossy close up of some brown or black arachnid immobilising
a helpless strugglin insect in a silk cocoon, or sucking out its bodily fluids. Coming upon one of these photos, I would
generally scream and throw the magazine into the air. Even today, I avoid bargain and toy stores in the weeks before Halloween, and find it hard to understand why any mentally healthy parent would
feel that a huge ‘toy’ tarantula would be an appropriate plaything for a
child.
My reaction to spiders in real life is usually to yell loudly for my
husband if he is available, or if not to roll up a newspaper and swat at the
thing furiously with my eyes closed and hope for the best.
This past weekend, I was cleaning the windows of the sun porch on our cottage
in preparation for applying some heat reducing film. The porch is a great space, but with 7
windows you could roast a turkey in there on a hot summer day!
I had just begun on the third window when I saw it- a small black spider
up in the right hand corner. Although I
felt the usual sensation of disgust, there wasn’t much actual terror, as the
creature was only about the size of the finger nail on my baby finger. Nevertheless, my first instinct was to reach
for the broom and bring her down, and normally I would do so without a second
thought. But half an instant after I saw
the spider, I saw something else- a white sack, also tiny, yet bigger than the
spider itself.
From reading EB White’s wonderful book Charlotte’s Web as a child (while
holding a piece of paper over the illustrations of the spider) I realised that
this was a female spider and that the little sack was full of her eggs. Interestingly,
as my cleaning hand had come within a foot or so of her corner, (shudder) she actually
crawled closer to this small cache, in an instinctive move to protect them from
harm.
I stood there contemplating her and her eggs, and somehow as I did so, she went from
being, in my mind, a loathed member of a hated species to a... well... to a Mother. I found that I could not simply sweep her and
her sack of babies into the next world, and in fact I did not even want to. I left their corner of the window alone, and
we skipped that window in our application of the heat reducing film.
I know that this moment, Godsome though it was, has not cured my arachnophobia, and I doubt that the next
time I see a spider the voice inside my head that usually screams “KILL KILL”
will be silent. But I was aware of a small shift in my being- perhaps as small as the spider and her brood of eggs. Perhaps it is a sign of hope- both for me and the spiders of the world.
As I lay the pole back in the pool and rested my arms on the edge, the small squireel ran around towards me and stopped- lying right across my forearm. Resting his water soaked body and two front paws on my arm, he looked up at me for a second or two. It was a cute encoutner, and I had enought time to ask him if he was tired before he jumped up and again, rested on my other arm. Then he jumped to the ground. 
