At First, the Spider Was Small

hanging out with scary neighbors

At first the spider was small. Just a shiny black teardrop, smaller than a colored pin, suspended in the corner of the window over my kitchen sink my first summer in this house. It was delicate in a way I found beautiful and certainly not threatening. I let it be.

I should say that I am not unafraid of spiders. They give me the heebie-jeebies, especially in the house. Especially the creeping ones that dash out at you unexpectedly. I don't like spiders near my bed or in my clothes or near my body. I'm squidged out by wolf spiders and shiny spiders and big spiders and fangy spiders and spiders that could maybe be black widows.

I also don't like killing spiders, both ethically and viscerally. I feel a kind of shocky horror about it, though I vacuum plenty, and I know, intellectually, that this kills them. So I kill them weekly with my vacuum, but I don't watch myself do it. I suppose this is true of most of the harm I cause in the world.

When I kill one on purpose, I feel shaky and ill. Instead, I keep a jar and a junk mail flyer in a couple of places around the house, ready to catch them and put them outside.

Outside, I like spiders. I'd happily watch one in its dewy web, drinking a liquified fly.  

I find I am unafraid of spiders who are smaller than a dime. So at first, I wasn't scared of my kitchen window spider. I couldn't catch her — she'd dart back into a crack in the window frame every time I tried. She was always in her little corner on her horizontal net web, or down in the crack. Hardly a danger. So I left her. And she grew.

By late fall, she creeped me out. She was substantial now, not a delicate little thing. She was shiny and black, with sharply bent pointy legs and a teardrop shaped abdomen. She liked to be upside down in her web, which had also grown bigger and thicker and spookier, more like Halloween cobweb, though I periodically cleared it out.

I climbed on a chair a few times, looking for a black widowy red spot on her belly. Nothing. I combed spider photos online, which are as graphic as medical photos. They gave me a weird morbid rush. I guessed that she was not a black widow, but might be a false black widow. Not a spider I'd choose to have in my house. I tried to catch her again and failed. Steeling myself, I got out the vacuum. She hid in her crack. I vacuumed the window clean, holding the nozzle against the crack for a long time. I put the vacuum away, a little ill.

She looked vaguely like this, but held her legs at sharper angles.

A few days later, she was back. She was still small enough to retreat deep into the crack. I let her be.

All winter and spring and summer she lived in the window. She came out mostly in the evenings, hanging almost companionably while I washed dishes. Especially if I put my phone on the other end of the windowsill to listen to podcasts while I cleaned up, she came out. Maybe she liked the vibration.

Every night, as I washed the dishes, I'd regard the spider. Shewas aware of me as well. At first, I watched her to know where she was. If she was there, she wasn't here, she couldn't hurt me. Looking at the spider gave me a kind of woozy surge, like tonguing at a toothache.

Spiders are aware of us in a way I find creepy and also respect. This spider seemed to have gotten a little less shy of me, not bothering to retreat unless I did something intrusive. I got less shy too. Over time, it felt less visceral. I could look at her without feeling adrenaline. I could think about her calmly. I was no longer so scared of her, as long as she was in her web and I was not.

I felt a tension in myself, coexisting with this spider. Fear and familiarity, squeamishness and respect. She was my neighbor. Not one I would have chosen, but still. She ate my fruit flies. She ate my ants. I'd flip on the kitchen lights, coming home, and there'd she be. I felt uncomfortable about her but also knew she was not actually out to get me.

Fall came again, and with it, the war in Gaza. I began to think about neighbors, about fear, about safety, about coexisting with those who we fear.

I wondered about the way fear causes hate.

I wondered, does our desire to kill or eradicate another creature make us hate them? We are afraid of them so we want to kill to make ourselves safe but the horror in that desire is so shameful that they become horrible by association.

Rationally, I'm the horrible one. The potential killer.

But because of my fear, the spider, little web-hunter, becomes the villain, when the most she can do is maybe give me a bite that necrotizes. I'm the one with the vacuum. I'm the one who routinely destroys her home. I'm the one who could suck her up in my crushing machine without even blinking an eye.

Yet, ugh, I don't want to live with spiders. Or: I don't want to feel the fear I feel when I am near them.

Nikki Giovanni writes about killing a spider in her poem, "Allowables," a poem where she wrestles with this killing as a metaphor, perhaps, for violence against Black people:

And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

I also do not believe I, or anyone, is allowed to kill because we are afraid. But how do we bear the tension of coexisting with people, creatures, things, that scare us?

I've always been squeamish about spiders, but it got much worse when my ex moved out. Suddenly, I was single-handedly taking care of the whole house and solo parenting our toddler. I had to be brave and tough about a lot of things. I was the adult. It was as if I just didn't have the reserves of courage to deal with spiders. It is so true that when we feel secure, we are less afraid of others.

It would feel good to get to be soft more often. To be scared of a spider and not have to be brave. To be scared of a spider even when I know it can't hurt me and have that fear be taken seriously. All creatures deserve to feel safe and secure in their homes. Israelis and Palestinians deserve to feel safe in their homes. I deserve to feel safe in my home. But do I deserve to kill a spider in her home for my own feeling of safety?

The spider lived on through that second winter, second spring. The obliteration of Gaza continued. Last summer, while I was off heat-wave road-tripping and blowing out my tire in Yakima, the spider left her window. I came home to an absence.

I saw a spider that looked like her a few times over the next few weeks, in a small web near a crack in the shelving where I store dishes, in a cold corner a few feet from the window. I suspected the window had gotten too hot, and I wondered if she would move back as it cooled. Instead, a small spider, a pin-sized teardrop, took up residence in the window and the big spider stopped appearing.

Just this week, I moved something on the windowsill,  and the little spider ran up onto the window. I caught him easily in a jar and took him out to the garden. I wondered how many generations of spiders had lived in that window, stretching back before my time. How little I knew about their minds, their decisions, their culture.

I don't know how long the window will be empty, but meanwhile, downstairs, a big black spider is living in the crack near the doorjamb. They are shy, and run back under the crack when I come in, but I still have the heebie-jeebies.

It seems to be a tension that recurs and recurs. Maybe one day I just won't be scared of spiders in my house. Maybe one day I'll decide it's my right just to kill them without quandary. But for now, I live in a troubled peace with my neighbors. I can't say I've found any geopolitical solutions washing dishes these last few years, but I've stayed in the tension. I've developed capacity for staying in the tension. And that's a start. Maybe it's enough.