Kevin the Spider

My DH is home, gammon is on, and life is good.

Like a lot of writers we know, our good life is, well, a little ... different.

I'm a long-time arachnophobe. Had to train myself out of completely freaking out, as in jumping around squealing, just so I could walk through the woods to the bus stop in the mornings. You see, orb weaver spiders, especially the ones that reach that nice, big, mature size, need a lot of room to make their webs, and besides, how else can you capture humans in order to suck their brains out through their eyeballs and lay eggs in their ears unless you build a web all the way across a people path?

I had an orb weaver in my kitchen window for a while. I called her Michele, a coworker terrified of spiders. Sadly, Michele, after getting really, really huge, got very weak one day and fell into the sink. Rather than let her stagger around in there, knowing she probably couldn't cling to her web anymore, I let her go outside, figuring she was done for. They only live a year, and she was long past that. I was sad. Me! An arachnophobe! But she never wandered from the window (except that one, sad, last time) to suck my brains out through my eyeball and never laid eggs in my ear, and for that reason, I was fond of her.

I had great plans to clean the window, but then Kevin moved in, named for a coworker who also doesn't like spiders. Kevin built one of those cobwebby-webs right under Michele's old, now tattered home. Kevin got big, and then I realized Kevin was probably a girl. Kevin vanished for a while, and then I found Kevin outside ... and figured out it was actually probably Kevina and she'd slipped through the window crack and couldn't get back in.

Now I have another Kevin, who appeared to have moved into Kevina's web. I knew it was a different spider, because he was smaller. Emphasis on the was. Once again, I'm fond of the fact that every day I go into the kitchen and Kevin is nicely staying put, eating flies that normally would bounce off the kitchen window and walk all over my nice food while I'm cooking. Now Kevin is even bigger than Kevina was. I mist his (better be a boy and not lay eggs!!) web every morning to make sure he doesn't get dehydrated.

Here he is:

I'll get a better picture of him later. He comes out quite often to bask in the sunshine and gloat over the corpses of his enemies.

I never thought to have a pet spider. Actually, I don't think that Kevin is so much a pet as he is a neighbor. He's a very good neighbor. Unlike that OMG creepy thing that descended from the ceiling right next to my DH while we were starting to get frisky ... talk about killing a mood!

I knew, just knew that nasty thing would have sucked my brains right out of my eyeball given half a chance. I fled. My DH bravely fought it off and killed it after an epic battle. He's my hero.

Kevin would never do that. Never.

Never.