Spider Surge

Like Fifth Columnists, tiny spiders are coming through the living room window, under cover of ladybugs.
There’s an untidy garden of flowers, a pear tree sapling, and a weed pretending to be a bush on the other side of that window, so we are used to seeing small dark, wing-ed specks come through the tattered mesh screen.
The baby spiders are just about the same size as the ladybugs so, in the corner of your eye they don’t arouse suspicion. Until that is, the mother ships arrive.
I’ve heard that this is Spider Season, whatever that means. I suppose that’s at least a hopeful designation, suggesting that most of these spiders are vacationing, or taking short-term leases – and should be headed back ‘home’ once the cooler weather gets a firm hold.
Still, some of these spiders are not as well-mannered as you might expect, of tourists.
There are the 101st Airborne Spiders (my designation for them, not an official scientific term), who drop down in front of the TV while you are watching, unconcerned that they are interrupting your show.
Then there are those Arachis who spin webs, overnight, in public places. On door knobs, or across hallways, or from bedpost to bedpost. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always thought that there were certain, semi-officially designated, acceptable places for house spiders to engineer their webs – and the spicket in the bathroom was never one of them.
It may be me, but I have the sense that spiders – as a species, are becoming more and more aggressive.
Even cockroaches show more sensitivity – coming out only under cover of darkness, and then scurrying for cover if the lights come on unexpectedly.
But the modern day house spider often insolently parades over the living room rug in the middle of the day, in the middle of Oprah for god’s sake – and only scurries for cover when you have a rolled magazine poised above them.
In the past I attributed the fat, swollen, itchy lumps that appeared on my arms and legs, between my toes, on the back of my neck and elsewhere at this time of year, to a wide variety of ointments, water treatments, ants, fleas, tics and such, which have in common a certain occult nature. But today I’m fairly certain that spiders are the cause.
I’ve counted seven varieties on our first floor alone.
Did you ever notice how everyone exaggerates the size of a spider? When you hear a description of a spider it is never less than an inch long, always hairy, and usually said to have strange stripes and spots and, I’ve also heard people say, speech impediments.
I saw one of those the other day – a big, hairy, spotted and striped spider with a pronounced lisp, in the family room, and before I could squash it with my foot, it leaped into the air, yelled out ‘thufferin thuccoatash”, and traveled about a yard before landing – purposefully I believe, smack dab in the middle of an oriental rug. (Did you ever notice how I use the phrase, ‘smack dab’ at least once in every column?)
Once on the Oriental it was effectively camouflaged – so I had to throw the whole rug away.
According to my research, it was actually either a Wolf Spider, or a Traveling Salesman Spider. It all happened very quickly, but I did think I got a glimpse of a small leather valise held by one of its eight hairy legs.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, that’s right: in the last three weeks I’ve recorded definitive sightings of eleven separate species of spider, on our first floor alone.
A Jumping Spider was easily identified, when it jumped into a cup of coffee that I had just put down on the little display table in the middle of the room. Jumping Spiders look like little fuzzy legged spiders carrying school rings but, as I discovered when I poured the coffee out onto a ball of wadded paper towels, that school ring is actually their colorful abdomen.
I also easily identified a Nursery Web Spider – which is also called a Fishing Spider, when I chased it out the house and into the neighbor’s yard where – faced with a choice of either a boot wielding madman or a dip in the neighbors pool, it jumped in and submerged itself.
I’m afraid of pool water, so I thought nothing of it until a week later when my neighbor had a pool party and I suddenly heard the scream of an arachnophobic woman who decided to take a late night dip.
By the way, isn’t the notion of arachnophobia silly? I mean, who isn’t afraid of spiders? Just like you can’t tell me that when you swim in the ocean – somewhere in the back of your mind you aren’t thinking, shark! People with phobias are supposedly mentally unstable, and unreasonably obsessive: but isn’t it stranger not to be afraid of spiders, or sharks, or clowns?
Anyway, after a brief conversation with my neighbor, I realized that I had correctly identified that speedy, three-inch, hairy-legged creature as a Pool Party Spider.
And speaking of clowns, I also identified another spider that had been lurking in the basement – based on the red nose, the large feet, and the tiny little car that it drove around in (and an abdomen shaped like a seltzer bottle), as a Clown Spider.
Anyway, you get my point – I think, that there is something odd going on, in terms of spiders, at least in my house.
I know it’s Spider Season, but I’m kind of worried that Labor Day has come and gone and these guys are still hanging around.
I’m thinking this is a Spider Surge and, if so, I’m going to have to get used to the idea of spiders in the house for years to come.