This morning as I was taking our puppy, Sophie Ru, out for her morning constitutional, it hit me. In the face. An intricate spider web strung across our front door. I was spitting and spewing and using my spare hand to quickly wipe away the web bits and to assess whether the creator of said web had made a quick jump onto my head during the demise of his work. I am sure anyone watching would have been entertained. I, on the other hand, was not.
I do not like spiders.
At. All.
It goes way back. I remember being terrified of them when I was small. Unlike Sister. Family lore has it that when one was crawling across the floor when she was just barely walking, she smacked it with her hand and was preparing to chow down before Mama quickly stopped her. The joke was she did it to protect me because I was quite likely terrified.
We had plants on our little front porch at the house on Boy Scout Road. Mama would take clippings and we would put them in Styrofoam cups for the PTG’s Halloween Carnival sale. They were quite popular. They were called airplane plants. Or spider plants. Ahem. For a reason I cannot recall, at one point there were some paint chips that had fallen into the pots of these plants. As service for some infraction, I was sent out there to clean the paint out of these plants.
‘Cause it’s a good idea to send an arachnophobe to clean out plants that are called “spider plants.” I was absolutely certain that the reason they were called that was because, in fact, spiders lived in every single one of them. I was miserable. But I did obey. Finally.
So back to this morning. Webbed in the face. The spider started crawling, and I still had to go back through this door to get inside. It was me or him. He crawled up high onto the transom area.
Y’all. Aragog? That big huge spider from Harry Potter? The one as big as an elephant? *whispers* He did not disappear in the forest. He is not dead. He is up there on that glass on my front porch.
It’s a lose/lose really. I don’t want him up there, but I don’t want him to just disappear either. I WANT to know where this thing is at all times. He is up so high, I can’t get a shoe up there to whack him, and I’m figuring it would be my luck that the wasp spray I have won’t touch him. That it would only serve to make him madder. Yeah, that sounds about right.
I don’t know why I don’t like spiders. For whatever reason they terrify me. I’m constantly checking to see if I feel any possible bites when I see one out and about. This whole disliking without a real explanation is almost enough to make me believe in previous lives. If that’s the case, I know bad things, spiders, and me all hung out for quite a while way back before when.
Mama tried everything to try to help me get over what was an unhealthy, almost crippling fear of spiders. She even got the book “Be Nice to Spiders.” She read it to us. A lot. In it a little boy named Billy leaves his pet spider Helen at the zoo because they are moving to a no-pets apartment. It’s all about how Helen helps the other animals at the zoo. Mama wanted me to see all the good that spiders can do. I appreciate Mama’s efforts, but I still don’t think I will find myself ever being nice to a spider. If I ever run into Charlotte, she’d better spell quick, because my MO with spiders is kill first, assess the toxicity later. If I can reach them, that is.
Note to self: Don’t use that door in the morning.
I Might Need A Nap 
I’m the same way with snakes. *Shudder*
Wow, you handled yourself so well at the Museum! I’m impressed. Seriously you would have laughed yourself silly watching me trying to make sure I didn’t have spider bits on me anywhere.