By Veronica Serwacki
Buffalo, NY – Henry David Thoreau's allusion to the "first spider in a new house" immediately flipped me back to the time when we moved out of our old Victorian house into a more modern abode and I wanted to transport all the house spiders from the old house to the new one. How could I leave such elegant creatures with their long spindly legs, gracefully perched on their tippy toes, racing about the walls and ceilings with the dexterity of supersonic jets? How could I leave them to await an almost certain demise at the hands of the newly nested, arachnophobic occupants?
As I rolled the memory around in my head I thought of the kitchen spider I used to see every day when I came downstairs to make the morning tea. It comforted me as a presence in the house to respect and never destroy because when I was raised in Africa I was always told that the house spider would consume the malaria carrying anopheles mosquito. An organic and natural pesticide, the spider is so good at its job of eating both large and microscopic insects that the ancient Chinese used to harvest them during the winter months. They would coddle them in warm houses of hay and then release them onto their crops during the summer time and the spiderlings would rid the plants of aphids and other leaf munching creatures.
I recalled a time early one morning when I came downstairs yawning with half awakened sleep to brew a pot of tea. As I was filling the kettle with water I stared at the countertop and saw what looked like a small oatmeal cookie crumb. "Funny" I thought, "I don't remember having any oatmeal cookies around." Since I didn't have my glasses to make a more definitive identification of the crumb, I ever so gently, perhaps from a deep seated instinct or sense of intuition, picked up the crumb in my fingers. "Woah, wait a minute!" I thought. "This doesn't feel like a crumb. It's not firm and crumbly like a crumb and it's way too light and feathery in its fuzzy beigeness." I quickly put the crumb back down on the counter and let out a scream for I'd been caught in that murky and scary realm of expectation when the expectation turns into something unexpected. The oatmeal crumb came to life and shot off into the minutest of crevices between the countertop and the dishwasher. Why did I scream if the crumb was my treasured, spidery, kitchen companion? Perhaps because the crumb spontaneously came to life and ran off to hide in a kitchen cranny, or perhaps it was because I almost tossed it into the garbage, or was it because I actually touched a spider with my fingers, having always preferred to admire them from afar. Maybe it was a combination of all three shocking realizations all merging at once.
Well it so happened that the first spider in my new house took up its abode on the bedroom ceiling. I see it from time to time on the walls or in the corners and sometimes in the bathroom sink enjoying a drop of water to drink. The microscopic amoebas and other creatures in the drop of water are as small to the well-visioned, eight eyed spider as the spider is to me. In fact my vastly inferior eye sight makes it very hard to see the spider when the background is such that the creature easily disappears into its patterns of mosaic.
I am constantly rescuing the spider from the slippery slopes of the bathtub. On my first rescue mission, I carefully nudged him onto a sheet of paper in order to carry him into the sunroom which houses a trillion house plants. My plan was to place the multi-legged creature onto a plant so he could silently feast on a tasty morsel of aphid. However, I soon realized I had seriously under-estimated his craftiness. As I quickly attempted to transport the little spitfire on the sheet of paper, he raced across the surface and shot off its edge, rappelling at the speed of lightning down an invisible strand. I tried to role up the invisible strand but as fast as I rolled, he produced more and more of the silky rope and dropped further and further towards the floor and before I could stop the dexterous descent, the spider had disappeared into the background of the multi-colored rug.
I slowly backed out of the room so that I would avoid accidentally stepping on him. Making sure I was no longer attached to his sticky strands and he not still dangling at the seemingly endless end of his rope, I left him to his own devices. Where he went, I have not a clue but I'm confident he found his way through the jungle of carpet fibers while consuming the microscopic dust bugs, cutting a trail towards the precipitous walls and mountainous ceilings and perhaps back to a sink or bathtub for another drop to drink.
Listener-commentator Veronica Serwacki works in the Dean's Office of the College of Arts and Sciences at Canisius College.