I’m not a fan of spiders. Really not a fan at all.
To be fair, I’m not a fan of lots of different bugs. Like wasps.
Wasps are assholes. A wasp once made me crash my car into a light pole. The pole was okay; I was okay; the car was totaled.
After I did that, though, I learned my lesson. Instead of trying to kill a bug while the car is moving, now I pull over.
Imagine the scene: I was up in Madison, New Jersey. Late at night. A cold winter night. Before the dawn of cell phones. I had just left Drew University where I had been visiting my boyfriend at the time (now my husband), and about three blocks down the way, I spotted it.
A spider on my windshield.
On the INSIDE of my windshield.
Instead of running off the road, I waited, stretching my arms out as far as they could go so that I was as far from the windshield as possible. As soon as I could pull over in the snow, I did. I hopped out of the car, took off a shoe and stood on one foot in the snow bank, trying to kill the spider in the windshield.
I did it!
It was dead!
But then I was afraid to get back into the car because, and I know this is totally rational, once you kill a spider, all the other spiders know. They gang up on you. They get you. It’s like a gang fight in West Side Story.
Anyway, that spider was dead.
Since then, I’ve been lucky. Anytime I had a spider in the car, I also had a passenger who could remove it one way or the other.
Until the other day.
There was a spider.
In the car.
On the inside of the window.
Right next to me.
It was somewhere between the size of a pinhead and a VW Beetle. I can’t quite remember in the blur of fear.
But there it was.
And there I was.
Then, like magic, I got it out of the car! I refuse to say how, in case other spiders are reading this, but this image shows what may (or may not) have been its final view.
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