I grew up around spiders. My grandfather built the house in 1921, complete with a damp musty cellar in which we stored, among other things, firewood. That corner of the cellar was the domain and realm of the so-called “wood spiders,” hairy and fast-moving and about the size of a medium-sized mouse. Apropos of nothing, my mother named these spiders, collectively, “Alice.” As in, “please go stoke the fire, but watch out for Alice.” We learned early on to either wear thick gloves when picking up firewood or kick the piece in question around a bit before grabbing it. Or maybe both.

The other spider on the radar is and was the Black Widow. The females are the bigger of the two sexes, with a red hourglass shape on their bellies. You almost never see the males because they are either dead or running for their lives. Anyway, their venom is rarely lethal, but they do pack a wallop. As my Dad would say, “First, you are afraid you are going to die. Then, you are afraid you aren’t.” These spiders were usually outside under things like rocks or that old cast ironed cook pot that had been upside down in the back pasture since before I was born. You never, never stuck your hand under anything like that. As my sister Laura said when her kids were small, “Be careful of black-and-red spiders.”

So why am I still so viscerally afraid of spiders? A book* I read offered an explanation. The author used the phrase “long-legged, low-bodied, scuttling arthropod,” and if that won’t visit your dreams, I don’t know what would. Anyway, our ancestors may have hung out on the beach for a few thousand millennia, during which time and place there were outsize arthropods threatening their children to the extent that a phobia of the same became branded into their DNA. Sounds as reasonable as any explanation I’ve heard yet.

Anyway, I don’t kill spiders. This is not benevolence toward my fellow creatures. Rather, it is a genuflection to the powers of the darkness. What I do is this: I trap them in a cup (clear, so I can see what they are doing) and slide stiff cardboard up the rim. Then I take the whole apparatus outside and let the monster fly free. That way, the fragile shell that holds the night terrors at bay remains intact. That, and spider-kind might decide, at some future contingency, to give me a free pass.  

*The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan.