The Spider in the Mailbox
I started to reply to a post on Tom Johnson’s blog this evening, and the reply spun out so long that I couldn’t resist stealing it back for myself! (I suggest reading Tom’s original blog post first…)
I can’t say I’m a big fan of aversion therapy; I go for mindfulness training, which seems more like what Sam did [see original post]. That is, he enlisted his conscious mind to help reshape his subconscious, and trained himself to confront his fear wisely and rationally instead of indulging his irrational fear.
Not one of my biggest fears, but one of my icky fears is spiders — I like snakes and reptiles, and most bugs don’t, well, bug me all that much, but spiders make my skin crawl.
When I saw “Charlotte’s Web” in the theaters, the close-up camera work of Charlotte both repulsed and fascinated me. (It’s one thing to read about Charlotte, another to see her dozens of feet across.) Since then I’ve tried to be more attentive to spiders; I try to trap them and take them outside instead of smashing them; I study them as much as I can.
In fact, there’s a spider in our mailbox right now. It started out tiny, and I would see it scurrying to the back corner of the box when I opened the little door to post or retrieve mail. Instead of trying to evict it, I let it stay. It had found a good home; why pester it?
Of course, every day when I went to check the mail, I thought of the spider, and the fact that it would be there. I felt nervous. Magnanimous. Guilty. As if I’d issued a stay of execution that might at any moment be canceled by fear or carelessness.
It’s still out there today, several weeks later. It’s bigger than when I first saw it. I’m not sure how big because it always tucks itself up into the top back corner of the box every time I open the door, but it would probably take up most of my palm. I actually worry about the spider these days, worry that the mailman will shove a batch of magazines in with too much force or a patch of severe weather will drown it out. I also worry, irrationally, that it will leap upon me in a fit of arachnoid ire and confirm my worst paranoias, but that’s fading with time.
There’s a pile of dry bug carcasses on the bottom of the mailbox, and wispy bits of web.
Now I confront my fear of spiders every day around 3:00pm. So far we’re both alive.
Tom Johnson said,
September 26, 2007 @ 12:06 am
Kill the spider, Beth! Just kidding. It must be interesting to balance your desire for optimism with a fear of spiders. It looks like you’re developing a working relationship with the spider now.
I saw Charlotte’s Web in the theatres too and was a bit repulsed by the ugliness of the brown spider.
Personally, I’m not afraid of spiders, but I do kill them without remorse (when they’re in the house). The way I figure it, if one is poisonous, I don’t want it biting one of my kids. So better to be safe than sorry.
Some neighbors around here (Santaquin) say they keep finding giant wolf spiders in their house and have had about a dozen or so in the past couple of months. I’m dying to find a wolf spider. They’re about the size of a grapefruit, I hear.