"You wouldn't have believed the size of the monster spider I just found under the clothes hamper," exclaimed my partner, the Lady Marjorie, in a voice dripping with disgust.
"I thought that's why we kept you men around - to handle all the creepy-crawly stuff. I hate those things."
When I moved the hamper, that sucker must have been as big around as a 50-cent piece. Spiders. Just the word elicits visions of either some bad, old-time, midnight-TV horror movie or the latest paperback copy of the computer spewings of someone like Stephen King.
Right now, in the midst of summer, it seems like we are right in the middle of the outdoor spider season. You can hardly venture out into the garden without running into their webs. If you look carefully in the early dawn, their dewy nets glisten like crystal doilies against the evergreens.
Yes, I know spiders are very helpful and help control the flying insect population. A month or so ago, an "itsy-bitsy spider" started spinning a web outside of our second-story bathroom window. It was interesting to check its progress each day and watch as it completed the web and then trapped no-see-ums and other little insects.
I was surprised at how fast the "itsy-bitsy spider" had turned into a quarter-sized predator that kept enlarging its web until it was soon the size of a large dinner plate.
One night, we had a summer storm or something, and the web was destroyed. I never saw that spider again, but in its place, another "itsy-bitsy spider," probably an offspring, was soon spinning another web.
Your basic, generic-variety garden spider that we have to deal with here in the Northwest, or earlier when I was living in Michigan, doesn't begin to match the fear factor generated by the black widow spiders and the tarantulas of my youth in southern California. We lived on what was then the outskirts of Los Angeles, and our backyard ended where the orange grove began. The barren foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains were only blocks away, an inviting playground to be explored when you were only 7 years old.
"You kids have to learn about black widows," I remember my mother lecturing one day.
"They're shiny black spiders with an orange, hourglass pattern on their stomachs. Don't try to turn them over, though; just squash any black spiders you see. Their poison won't kill you, but it will make you really sick for a few days.
"So be sure, if you leave your shoes in the garage overnight, to knock out any spiders that might have crawled into them before you put them on."
After Mom's little speech, we naturally went searching for this poisonous monster that inhabited our new home. We were shocked to realize that virtually every spider we could find was a black widow. The tarantulas were a lot more rare; I remember seeing only two, in the wild, the whole 10 years I lived there.
We moved to Michigan when my father was transferred at his job, and I was reduced to telling scary spider stories at Halloween and around campfires.
"Sandy, have you got a fly swatter?" I asked one evening as we were all gathering in the kitchen of a friend's old Michigan farmhouse.
We were preparing one of our monthly feasts, and as I walked in the door, I seemed to have let a large fly in with me.
"Don't worry," Sandy replied, "Ralph will get it."
"Ralph?"
"Ralph, my kitchen spider," Sandy grinned. "Hey, man, it's the natural method of pest control. He's been around for a while now and has a web over the plants on the window-sill that will eventually ensnare the fly.
"I haven't seen him today, though; maybe one of the cats got him.
Later that evening, after we had all sat down at the table, I became aware that something in my salad was moving. Ralph crawled out from under a lettuce leaf attempting to shake the creamy Roquefort dressing off his eight legs.
"Uhhh, I think I found Ralph."
Sandy gathered him up and quickly washed him off and returned him to his web. That little episode though, as they say, tended to put me right off my feed for the rest of the night.
I wonder if I'm arachnophobic now.
Freelance writer Gary McDaniel is a Magnolia resident. His column appears in the News every other Wednesday. He can be reached at qanews@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
