I Do Like Spiders and Snakes

Picture and words by Laura Solberg.

I do like spiders and snakes.
Always have.....Grew up in Southern Michigan (gesture left hand with thumb extended and point with right hand to spot just west of the bottom of the thumb of the left hand which is Belleville Michigan, always felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have an anatomically correct map of the state where they were born). Big old three floor house I grew up in was always loaded with daddy long-legs. (They was the only daddys around ‘cause it was me, my sister, my mother and my grandmother, a family of females except for the spiders). The other females must have been spider-tolerant because I don’t remember ever having any fear or negativity about having them spideys around. So I liked them. Them and the crickets who chirpyratcheted in every closet and the basement. Bug-friendly I was and still is. Snakes never worried me neither, but that’s another yarn because now I have some swell pictures of our house spider I wanna put in the blog so I gotta write sumthin about her.
So our house spider is a beaute! (Actually she is one of many house spiders but she is the one I have the pics of and she’s a real uplifting experience specially if you don’t like spiders......I mean by that she is a pretty big hunk of spider meat, thick and substantial). We’ve had ‘em like her before (I always calls them shes since my son was a tiny guy because I thought it would make him more well-rounded religiously to be surrounded by lots of shes, so every gender unspecified animal in any story I read him automatically became a she and he turned out fine for a nineteen year old!) Anyways she’s not the first. This particular brand of spidey likes to hang around on the kitchen counter by the night light for the obvious reason that she can snag moths who come to the light and she eats them. Or maybe she just zaps them immoveable and hogties them and hauls them into her paper bubble that she spins for herself and maybe grows a baby spiderette in there sucking the living juices out of that helpless moth. Something downright honest about living that way. Authentic no holds barred live or give it all up pansy. So back to Mama spidey as I have always called her. She must be somethin of a silkworm that I read about from Japan who spins a cocoon of pure silk. Mama makes a paper bubble attached to whatever is closest.....many times she has done it in the well created by the electric plugs outlet in the wall behind the kitchen counter. This is very conveniently located by the night-light sort of like living in McDonalds drive up parking lot. This time this new spidey has made a unique choice and built her mobile home in a triangle between the wall, a china cup we keep knives in when they are not in the dish drainer or the sink, and a note card that I keep propped up against the wall to remind me nothing but the Christ can enter mind body or environment. You maybe can even read it in my swell picture (but maybe not I can’t exactly say) which is how all this writing got started anyway. So there, she must be the Christ after all so what is there to be sceered of which I am not but plenty of people are in my experience. When I was focusing on getting a decent snap of her I kept my Nikon Cool-Pix (which aint much of a camera professionally really but it makes me happy snapping all the time at bugs and flowers and sunsets and my favorite dog and maybe someday I will get a “real” camera and look like I know something and make people snap to attention uncomfortably when I point it around in a crowd.....) (By the way I don’t ken how anyone ever learned to take any good pictures before digital because you had to remember you were using real film and wait to see how you did. Give me digital anyday—snap em, download em and let delete sort em out is my motto!) (By another way I love all my pictures like they was my babies the good the bad the ugly, but I got lots so I don’t mind them being assessed and evaluated because there is usually a beaute or two I happened to get by accident, very satisfying). I kep my Nikon Cool-Pix right there on the counter alongside the peppers and the salt shaker and the mess from making tea and salad so I wouldn’t miss her when she came out of her paper arrangement. I am still working on figuring out the settings on my Cool-Pix so I take loads of bad pictures and some good ones which is what I did with Mama. I live with the “Editor of the World” so he looks through all my pics and decides which one he is willing to publish and so there it is at the top of this page. Mama cooperated some and played hard to get some depending on the day and the time of day and maybe her hormones I dunno. Sometimes she climbed right out of her hole and showed her hairy eyebally self to good advantage on the nothing but the christ.....card. More times she played coy and all shylike staying just behind the card but out of her white paper tent. Maybe she was tired of hanging around inside with her son or daughter chewin or sucking on that moth. As I say I dunno. I just like to watch her and share space with a friendly eightlegger like her. One time was my favorite. I came out in the kitchen to wash out my bowl of quinoa sprouts tomatoes and peppers and I was considerin puttin on the tea kettle to make a cup of tea and was thinking about asking G if he hankered a cup of tea this late in the day because it would make up both have to get up in the night.......there was Mama, just her first digit of her front leg I guess, hanging over the edge of the nothing but the christ card. Seemed like she was giving us the finger upside down. Probably is a great compliment in spidyeeese. Anyway that’s how I choose to see it because I like spiders always have.