Arachnophobia

It's black widow season here in Davis and my joy is nearly boundless. I've had five sightings in the past few days, all in delightfully unexpected places. Don't get me wrong, I love spiders. How could I not, as an equestrian. It's flies that I have to hate. I've had a comfortable peace with the spiders in my house until quite recently.

Monday morning was a cool, breezy and beautiful garbage collection day. I walked out barefoot to drag the cans to the curb, carefully avoiding the crunchy snails on the sidewalk. As I tilted the toter back onto its wheels, the grandmother of all black widows spilled onto the ground with an audible thunk about half an inch from my big toe and began scrambling for whatever shelter she could find -- namely, my toes. Never a morning person, I became quite nimble for a moment.

When I was a child, my mother declared war against these beautiful critters. When she discovered one under the kitchen sink, she would invert a plastic produce bag over her hand, grab the spider and knot the end of the bag. The hapless victim would then be laid out on a cutting board, unceremoniously smashed repeatedly with a rolling pin, and neatly disposed of in the trash. I thought it unnecessarily brutal at the time. Now I think I am beginning to understand ...

They hide under my Firebird and nest in the paper bags I save for the recycling. This morning, I discovered a tiny, brazen one building a web in broad daylight just under the lip of my bathroom counter. My other 50% once told me that he tried to kill a black widow with Windex, but she only got shinier. Soooo ... I tried my Clorox bathroom cleaner with Teflon. This one was not only a much deeper, gleaming black afterwards, but seemed to get bigger in an impossibly Incredible Hulk-style moment. After glaring at me balefully for a moment with each and every eye. she hid deep underneath my counter. I can only hope that she will give me fair warning as she prepares her Teflon-coated revenge.

I , for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords.