Right now, in our wrought-iron security door, there is a complex network of webs built by funnel-web spiders. You can get a front-row seat to the action if you watch from inside the house. Sort of like an ant farm, but way creepier. I have counted eight, that’s right, EIGHT funnel web spiders in the network of webs, each perched on the mouth of his or her little funnel porch just behind decorative iron acorns and oak leaves. Each spider is surrounded by a sizable collection of bug carcasses, including one dead non-funnel-web spider whose expired body lies near the biggest funnel-web spider, who I believe is the matriarch of the family, as she was there first and she is the biggest of the bunch. (Incidentally, that is cold, to take out another spider like that and leave its hollow body blowing in the breeze to warn the others to steer clear of your turf. Cold.)
My lifelong spider revulsion is legendary (at least in my own head), so this is big for me, to live in relative peace with spiders just out there doing their thing in common living spaces like that. Granted, I am overcome with mild terror every time I go in and out of the front door, but it’s a terror that I am allowing because I mostly control it. At any point I could get the shop vac out and suck those little shits into oblivion but I haven’t yet done that because then I would have a vacuum cleaner that would be infested with spiders and nothing good can ever come of that, now can it?
And, despite how gross and neglected our front door looks (it’s like a not-quite haunted house before the neighbors have discovered the dead body inside), I don’t want to spray a whole bunch of chemicals and kill them all. That feels a little too aggro. And I already went after them with a broom a few weeks ago and they bounced back bigger and better than before.
So I am attempting to come at this from a few angles to make it sit right.
First, I am assuming that these spiders are doing their part to regulate mosquitoes in the yard, and possibly other annoying bugs (although truly it looks like their most-eaten meals involve gnats or other tiny flies). If they can kill mosquitoes, I can let them live. Because despite spiders giving me a much more powerful visceral reaction, mosquitoes actually do try to ruin my life every year.
Second, the past several months I have been making creepy witch bottles, many of which involve fake spiders of some sort. So I have fake spiders all over the house and am constantly rediscovering fake spiders that I have dropped and briefly freaking out before remembering these are my dumb plastic spiders. The upside of this is that by the fifth or so time I discover a fake spider I’ve forgotten about, it gets easier to not be freaked out. I had hoped that this would help me react less screamily when encountering real spiders, but I discovered the faultiness of that dream this morning when a real spider skittered past a fake spider twice its size and ran under the hutch and I cursed very loudly and proclaimed that the hutch had been taken by the enemy and to abandon all hope of extra storage.
My husband, who was laughing at me from the comfort of the toilet during this incident, came into the room and informed me that he had killed a spider in that same spot last night. He then found the dead spider and showed it to me, which is one of his love languages. While I appreciated the gesture, it really only made me more freaked out because two spiders in the same location is an obvious sign of a massive takeover in the works.
Also, why doesn’t he throw away dead spiders instead of leaving their smashed bodies on the floor????
Third, I’m thinking of this as a nature experiment. I am experimenting with how long I can allow nature to exist thisclose to my everyday paths.
Lastly, I figure these little dudes don’t have all that long on this Earth anyway. Who am I to take out a whole family that’s just trying to live, even if I find them physically repulsive in every way? Sure, every day when I come home from work, they have spun their web onto the door knob and I have to gently swipe it off so I can open the door to get into my house, but I figure they are just trying to expand their horizons a little bit.
They always try again. And really, isn’t that something to be respected?