eww… spiders

Last night I was cooking dinner (some mean sloppy joes, by the way) when I found a big skinny spider casually hanging out in a mixing bowl.  A bowl I had messed around with just a few hours earlier as I put away dishes. 

Eww. 

I calmly carried the bowl to the sink and washed the spider down the drain.  But Spider’s Mama and Daddy had bought him swimming lessons this summer and that boy swam against the tide and crawled back up the sink.  So I used the sprayer to wash him down again.  And this time I left the faucet running for a while.  When he was halfway to El Dorado I finally turned off the water.

Not properly killing a spider reminded me of a time when I was in middle-school and I found a spider in the bathtub.  Instead of smooshing it and throwing it in the trash, I decided to keep it on the floor underneath a cup so that I could see how long it could live without eating.

It was a cruel little experiment, although at the time I didn’t see that and was just inquisitive.  Every morning I’d lie on the floor, lift up an edge of the cup, and slam it down before the spider could escape. 

After THREE WEEKS (spiders can live a long time without food, by the way) I lifted up the edge of the cup as I had every morning, watching the spider go from feisty and quick-to-run to lethargic, and found the spider barely moving.

That’s when the guilt kicked in.  I felt terrible that I’d drawn out this spider’s death.  So I carried him out to the landscaping in the front yard and let him go.  Where I’m sure he promptly died from hunger or getting eaten by another bug, but I told myself he rebuilt his energy and lived a long spider-life after that.

And that completes a non-necessary tale about my childhood.