At what size does a spider become a menace? No, really, this is a real question. Yesterday there was an innocuous little arachnid on the pristine wall of the bathroom. Really small, like less than a millimeter-the whole thing, legs, body everything. I took the hair dryer I was blowing my hair with and turned it on him to blow him somewhere else, where I wouldn’t have to look at him. He didn’t creep me out. Didn’t make my flesh pop out in goosebumps. Nothing. I saw this same spider again this morning. Same thing. Now, I admit, there was a time when I would have handled this a little less calmly. I would have gone straight to the “smoosh” mode. But I’ve matured. I’ve come to not get hysterical just because something has 8 legs and is walking on the wall.
BUT, also this morning, I went out to retrieve the morning paper. Upon coming back to the front door, I realized that there was one of those gauzy spider webs on the mailbox attached to the wood next to the front door. It has been there before and I keep knocking the web down with the broom and it keeps coming back. The mailman yesterday informed me he thought it was part of the Halloween decorations. It isn’t. I would never use even fake spider webs to decorate anything. It’s not in me, sorry. Anyway, seeing this creepy wispy web on the mailbox again and I began to make a pass with the paper picked up, you know, brushing it away again. But I was arrested with a sudden glimpse of a leg. One of eight. It was brown and significantly longer than the millimeter shortstuff in the bathroom. It was not a “daddy long legs” spider, which I don’t seem to have a problem with either. Nope, this was a junior tarantula. I stood stock still at the size of the thing. There was another leg visible as I got closer to the door. It seemed enormous. Those goosebumps I didn’t have with the guy in the bathroom, they leap all over me. This thing could eat me for breakfast I thought.
In all honesty, it could not. It would run away, right? It wouldn’t run up the broom handle (which I did see a spider do in one of those stupid documentaries about spiders—this kind lived in the jungle—not in suburbia). It wouldn’t jump out and attack me, right? But of course, it could. You know animals do protect their territory. It could come at me, menacingly.
So I’m left with the question. Why did the little one in the bathroom not bother me, but the gargantuan on the mailbox make me want to go to the back door to get back in the house rather than confront it? What size becomes menacing? I’d really like to know.
