Spider Philosophy

Spring has brought with it house guests, some invited, some not.  Under the category of the "not invited" are those of the eight-legged kind, also known as spiders.  Right now the ones I see most are smallish and tend to be found on the tile floors in our bathrooms.  Their parents hang out (literally) on the porch overhang and are at least 1 - 2 inches long.

We also see the occasional tarantula outside, but they are harmless and are therefore not a threat of any kind. 

But while these spiders are harmless, the Black Widows found in the garage and around the property are not.  They are dispatched quickly using a shoe or can of Raid.  I make no apologies for that, if it can harm me, my family or my livestock, it can't stay around.

But it's what we do with the harmless house spiders that interests me. Unless there is a substantial risk that the spider will escape and be lost, say, somewhere in back of my bedroom headboard (where, in my fantasies, it will wait until I'm sleeping to crawl on my face), my usual method of control is a mason jar and page from a magazine.  I place the jar over the spider, run the magazine page underneath it, and place said spider safely outside where it can continue doing what God intended it to do -- killing other bugs.  If the weather is cold and makes them unable to fly, I've even been known to do this with house flies.  Perhaps I was a buddhist in a former life.

I learned all this at my mother's knee.  I believe she was the one who taught me, at a tender age, to value all life, in all its forms.  And yet now I wonder if I memories are correct, because the last time she was here and saw me capturing a spider to place it back outside, she informed me that, wherever she found spiders, she would smash them to a pulp, then and there.

I can't help but wonder what changed my mother's outlook regarding the wild creatures she taught me to respect and love.  Or maybe I over-estimated her love for them and she merely tolerated my own respect of their right to live. To some extent, I know it was a mindset I was born with, like having blonde hair or green eyes.  Perhaps my mom was only humoring me when I was a child.

I'll never know for sure, but as long as I'm alive, I hope I have a mason jar option for everything that I don't want in my life.  Contain its influence and remove it to a place where it can't possibly hurt you.  Then let it live out its life in peace, as you do yours.