She's been living to the left of our front door for a week, hanging in a web, a little above waist high. She is about the width of a nickel. As I unlock the door, she sits inches away.
Her proximity creates a conflict. You see, we afraid of spiders. We know we shouldn't be; they are almost all harmless to us; they eat insects; they have as much right to be there we do. But that doesn't still our visceral reaction to encountering one.
Inside, within our turf, we know our policy. We'll try to expel the eight-legged creature without harming it. We catch them and throw them outside. Sometimes this damages the creature, but we're pretty good at it. We certainly don't have the right to kill them just because we are afraid. We spend our lives trying to discourage the impulse to kill people and ideas we are afraid of.
But spending a week saying "hello" to a spider as we come in the door is wearing. We won't mind when she departs, as she must, as we all must ...
2 comments:
I let spiders live also and even inside the house unless they reach a certain size. I have a little one in the bathroom that has a web with many tiny insects in it. I didn't even know we had that many little flying things but that spider provides us a service-- even if it might upset a few of our human visitors. If they get too large though, they have to go out-- alive if possible.
Remember Charlotte. She "departed" eventually - leaving behind hundreds of baby spiders.
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