In the spidery season
I feel a presence in the night. The cat snaps awake. He looks up. Is someone on the roof? My ears detect nothing. I follow his gaze.
A dot inches across the ceiling. It tucks itself under a slat of wood trim. The tips of its legs hang out like eyelashes.
(Wikimedia Commons/public domain)
Welcome to spider season. At this time of year, spider photos replace photos of sweeping vistas on our mountain websites. What kind is it?, worried posters ask. Wolf spider, replies one. Brown spider, says another. Brown recluse?, a poster asks. No, just brown.
Since our cold snap ended a couple of weeks ago, multitudes of spiders emerged. They have a great deal of catching up to do. Go down an outdoor stairway you went down two hours earlier, and freshly spun filaments tickle your face. Sweep, and you will find new webs in the corners the next morning. Sometimes you can find spectacular yellow-and-orange spiders in intricate webs strung between bushes and trees. That’s photo-worthy. Indoors, babies as wide as toothpicks scale the bathroom walls. A daddy longlegs stumbles across the hearth.
We are greatly outnumbered at this time of year. It is their forest, and we are only interlopers in it.
I don’t want to share my bed or my bathroom mirror with a spider. Most of all, I don’t want to be bitten. Some of these guys can raise a welt. Some can put you in the hospital. They can’t stay. The little ones can’t be allowed to get big, or we might end up with “Animal Planet” action in our own homes.
The cat has grown lazy about spiders. He used to seek them out and lap them up like calamari. Now he looks, turns and goes back to sleep.
Somewhere I read that you could spray spiders dead with Aqua Net. The hairspray would stiffen them to a slow, inhumane end. I must have been mad about spiders in more ways than one to try it. All I got were shiny spots on the walls, no stiff spiders.
There’s only one sure way to deal with spiders in the house. I get out my flip flops that go whop! when I walk, grab a Kleenex, steal downstairs to the cupboard and return with my remedy. I coax the spider into the jar, clap a sheet of paper over the top, go back downstairs and release our visitor into nature.
California WildWoman 