Trigger alert: I said I would and here you have it.  Here’s the piece on spiders. 

It’s Halloween, and everywhere I turn in the streets of Weston I’m bombarded with ghoulishness. Skeletons hang from porches and sit on garden furniture. They all seem poised to wrap their bony fingers around the outstretched wrists of little children who are ready to fill their baskets with treats and hopefully get freaked out a bit in the process. I like the skeletons.  They’re mostly human but birds and rodents are popular now too. It’s a nice nod to All Saints Day on November 1.  Other houses have new sets of inflatables, and while I am eagerly anticipating the erection of oversized Santas in just a few weeks, I find the current batch of blowups trivial by comparison. Some houses in Weston go crazy with sound and light shows, an outlet for creativity which I admire. 

But every so often, there is a household that feels a collection of spiders is the way to go - large, small, hairy, hanging, sitting, all ready to pounce. If this is you, this blog is a message to say, Stop!  Please.  Nobody wants to relive childhood spider-induced trauma.  And for goodness sake, you’re doing nothing to slow the spread of arachnophobia.  

I know I’m not alone - indeed, I’ve got several immediate family members who are with me in this anti-spider camp. As a little girl on the farm, I was anxious to build rapport with my teenaged sisters and so was prepared to emulate them any way I could. Memorizing all the Beatles and later Queen lyrics was one way. Picking up their fears seemed another and spiders were top of list.  Many times one parent or the other would rescue me from sure death by taking an offending spider out of the bathtub or off the sloped ceiling over my bed. Farm houses are full of such delights. When I left home, I had to learn to manage these traumatic moments on my own and so you will see to this day, every room in my house sports a Kleenex box, that if you look carefully, will have spider guts on the bottom.  Kleenex boxes are the perfect size to ensure death, while providing a safe distance from hand to spider. Added bonus: the tissue is right there to wipe the evidence off the wall. If you’re quick, you don’t leave a mark. 

I’ve had some life-altering moments involving spiders - ones too big for the Kleenex box. The worst was in 2004 when I went to Australia for Christmas. I was a student, and getting a long holiday break was something I knew wasn’t going to happen again for many years, so I took full advantage of one of my closest friends having a place in Melbourne and access to a company apartment in Sydney.  It was in that Sydney apartment where we realized we were definitely not in Wingham anymore. We were hanging out, doubtless discussing some serious topic like hair products, whether we could still recite the definition of “art” from grade 9 art class, or what bottle of wine we should open for dinner. Suddenly, I noticed a hairy leg emerge from behind the blinds on the patio door. No, not anyone’s boyfriend - we wished. The first leg was joined by three more. We knew there were more legs to come. Horrified, we backed away from the patio, clutching each other.  

“What do we do?” I said, sotto voce. 

“Don’t think it’s poisonous; the big ones aren’t” my friend, a seasoned Australia resident replied, the quaver in his voice betraying the genuine fear I knew he (or any reasonable human) would be experiencing.  He was removing a black boot.

I would’t call either of us terribly athletic, but he flung that fashionable footwear for all it was worth (a lot) and it hit the window with a thud, thankfully not breaking the glass, but knocking our new eight-legged friend to the floor. I’m certain it thudded too. At least I remember it being that big.  Then, as if by magic - poof, it was gone. There was no dead body, leading us to believe that the blow it received was not a fatal one. We fled to another area of the condo. We consumed some extra wine that night to get the courage necessary to go to bed. I slept on my mattress on the living room floor with one eye open. We packed up the next day, knowing our brush with near-death was not something we wanted to repeat. 

On that same trip, I visited another Canadian friend, this one living in the country outside Canberra. She was more savvy and took me around the property pointing out its wildlife features - here’s a good spot to watch the kangaroos gather across in that meadow;  here are where the most colourful birds like to gather in the morning; here is our redback spider - DO NOT touch it; and at night, make sure to knock your shoes before you put them on if you need to go to the bathroom.  They might have scorpions in them. WTAF??!!  Why does anyone live in this country?  

But spiders are not just in Australia, although they have the deadliest. When I left Ontario for BC 20 years ago to go to law school, I fixated on wolf spiders, the benign but enormous hairy yucky eight-legged creatures that plague Vancouver Islanders. OK maybe not everyone considers them a plague, but as I drove across the country, a nervous soon-to-be 35 year old student, I imagined them crawling all over the walls of my new apartment.  In fact, I never saw one in three years. But I never let my guard down. Gross disgusting beasts.

During law school, I took a four month internship in Brussels at the European Commission.  I would not have thought Brussels a hotbed of arachnid activity. I went without knowing anyone there or speaking either of the Belgian languages, and without any income, so it was all kind of scary. I rented a flat in an old house, and one night I watched the largest domestic spider I’d ever seen - and I say that as a farm kid - roaming around on the face of my fireplace.  I was entirely freaked out, ran downstairs to my landlord for support and, naturally, by the time he got there, it was gone. I slept with my eyes open and my ears closed for many many days thereafter. (Spiders are notorious for climbing into ear canals and laying eggs, or so I’m told. Just another horror.)

Just today, I took mail from my mailbox, touching something soft in the far corner. I looked more careful and nearly threw up seeing a thick web with some dark nastiness buried deep within. One of those “OMG, what if it had gotten on me!” moments. 

So folks, be more sensitive to the spider displays at this oh-so-festive season of fall fantasy. Stick to the supernatural. Don’t scare us with things that could be real.  Please. 

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