A Little Spider Story

In the spirit of Halloween, Auntie V’s Story Hour today involves a spider.

It is no secret that I hate spiders. I REALLY hate spiders. This phobia has been a long-standing joke among my family and friends, and was the subject of an A+ paper in my college Abnormal Psychology class. I have been rescued from spiders by neighbors, friends, one very indulgent husband, and my kids. It seems odd that one of the eight-legged monsters would inspire a blog post, but this was too cute and too funny not to share.

My Halloween decorations include two large plastic spiders. I put them on the front porch, usually with pumpkins or mums or whatever I can prop them against. They are not very real-looking, and after a few days of staring at them from a safe distance across the room, I can work up the courage to pick one up and take it outside for the Halloween display. This year, they have been stuck in my half-dead ferns, and can be unnerving once you catch a glimpse of them, tucked away in the leaves.

 
With thunderstorms and high winds for the past two nights, I wanted to keep the spiders safe. Not because I couldn’t imagine life without them, but because I didn’t want them to be blown off the ferns, only to be discovered in the mulch next spring when I began putting in my warm-weather flowers. I would have had a heart attack if I had seen one of those lying in my flower bed, not remembering they were the missing spiders from October. I picked them off the ferns and tossed them into a pumpkin bucket on the front porch for the night.
 
This afternoon, Davis was re-arranging my pumpkins on the front porch and started laughing. “Mommy,” he said, “There’s a REAL spider in with the plastic ones!” I walked over and took a look inside the bucket. Sure enough, there was a small spider in with the two much, much larger fake ones.

My over-active imagination went into overdrive as I began imagining what this little spider thought when he fell or crawled into the pumpkin bucket. Was he terrified of his dinosaur-sized cousins? Was he a misfit spider who didn’t have many friends and who was trying to recruit these two to return with him to show all the other spiders how cool he was? Would he go back to his home and tell everyone about the giant mutants he had encountered during his travels? Would they believe him, or would they think he was a lunatic?  Would he go down in spider history as a spider Shakespeare, who would chronicle his adventure in the land of the gigantic?
 
I practically had an entire children’s book written in my head when the kids called me in to work on Halloween cookies. If you ever see “Sparky the Spider’s Giant Adventure” in bookstores, pick up a copy…