The Spider in the Bathroom
“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.”
We have not been to our island home for several months. Hesitantly, we open the front door. We are both feeling a bit of anxiety. Has a pipe burst during the cold spell? Has someone broken in through the sliding door? But no, our home welcomes us as if we have just been out for a walk. That is, except for the cold. The house has weathered several snowstorms and torrents of rain during our absence; the cold has seeped into the walls. It is freezing! My husband heads to the living room to light the stove while I head to the bathroom. No, not because I have been sitting in the car for several hours. I want to greet the spider who has been living in the bottom corner of the cabinet by the toilet for longer than I can remember. She is not there! I worry that she may have succumbed to the cold. But there is a bit of webbing strung between the toilet brush and her hidey-hole and a few deadwood bugs. This gives me hope. I leave these signs of habitation and head outside to help unload the car.
Are you shuddering with disgust, thinking, what kind of housekeeper is she? Or are you nodding your head with understanding, also someone who is okay with a resident spider? I am now thinking of other examples I can give you of insects you might be comfortable living with, but nothing comes to mind. I suppose if we moved outside I would have more examples. Like me, you probably don’t mind the mouse living in the woodpile. I thoroughly enjoy the chickadees nesting in the planter my father made us many years ago. And I even have a grudging admiration for the starlings who have ripped out steel wool and bent metal to return to their nest under the eaves.
So, later that night, my husband and I sit snuggled by the fire, enjoying a bowl of reheated spaghetti and a glass of red wine – still trying to warm up! We had planned to go to the pub for dinner, but their kitchen closes at 7:45. We would never have made it in time. Anyway, we’re sitting by the fire, and my husband says, nice to see our bathroom spider has survived the cold. I gasp with delight. You saw her, I ask? Yes, he was sitting on the toilet brush but quickly scurried away under the cabinet. Note the gender references. Why ‘he’, I ask? He shrugs and responds that he didn’t give it any thought. Is it normal, he wonders, for men to say ‘he’ and women to say ‘she’? Maybe, I reply. However, I see our spider as a fierce, protective mother scurrying back to protect her eggs. Then I think, how many eggs? And it hits me; I hope she is not poisonous! She is small, with a fat black body. We have both brown recluse and black widow spiders on the island. I know she is not a brown recluse, and I am pretty confident she is not a black widow spider.
This is not my only spider friend. We have a resident daddy longlegs in our downstairs bathroom on the mainland. Sometimes, she hangs in the corner above the shower. I wonder if she enjoys the steam? Other times I find her tucked in a corner at the bottom of the cabinet, where I expect there is a space she crawls into. Once the weather gets warmer, I will move her outside.
And last summer, I had a long-term relationship with a wolf spider, although I think there may have been multiple wolf spiders. While I have a healthy respect for wolf spiders, I do not like them! Every morning when I went to take a shower, I would carefully pull back the shower curtain and, at least twice a week, there would be a wolf spider in the bathtub - a big one! I would put her in a cup and place her in the backyard among the plants. I was never sure how she found her way back to the bathtub. I’d like to think it was the same spider, better than the alternative!
I have no fear of spiders, although I find some of them creepy. I have seen absolutely humongous spiders scurrying behind wardrobes while vacationing in Hawaii and Bali. Once, while on a birding walk through the Ubud countryside, our guide pointed out a foot-long spider hanging in a web, just inches from our heads. And, on sunny, dewy mornings at our island home, a network of webs spun by lawn spiders grace our field. Beautiful to look at; unsettling to walk through.
I feel an affinity for my bathroom spider. I wonder if Charlotte has anything to do with that? No, not my new granddaughter, but Wilbur’s dear friend, who, “underneath her rather bold and cruel exterior, had a kind heart, and was to prove loyal and true to the very end.”