Here’s the true story this spider photo reminded me of:
When I first moved into my little 1920s house in 2006, every once in awhile I would walk into the living room and notice, in the periphery of my vision, what looked to be a dark smudge up on the wall near the ceiling. By the time I’d actually move my eyes to focus on the ‘smudge,’ nothing would be there, so I thought it was merely my imagination. This would occur perhaps once a year or so.
I was on a ‘cleaning frenzy’ one night (about 3 years ago) and moving quickly around the house with my vintage Electrolux canister vacuum cleaner using the hose with a small attachment and vacuuming all the nooks and crevices along the floor. I flung open a folding louvered wood door leading into the living room to vacuum the little area on the floor where dust bunnies gather.
I’m moving really fast, my vacuum attachment headed down to the corner on the floor and suddenly I ‘hear’ a tiny “STOP!” and I see (without my glasses on, so it’s a little blurry) what looks to be a little planet with a lot of satellites spinning around it!
As I focus, I realize that it is a gigantic wolf spider mother surrounded by hundreds of frolicking little baby spiders! Next to my BED! As I watched, all the babies ran to their mother and jumped on her back. It was a most amazing thing to see.
Luckily for me, I’ve been a lifesaver-of-spiders for most of my life and I knew exactly what to do. That mother spider was waiting for the ‘bus’ to go outside! And that was a bus I was driving. I ran into the kitchen and got a plastic cup and a square postcard of a mandala with plastic laminate that I use for just this purpose. I ran back to the mother spider, and she and all of her babies were there waiting for me patiently. I carefully slid the plastic laminate under her (she was most cooperative and took some steps onto it too.) She and her babies were very calm as I covered them with the plastic cup.
I took that mother spider and her babies out to the woodpile in the backyard and watched her as she casually walked off of the plastic laminate onto the wood.
Spider Mother and Babies Bus Mission Accomplished!
And most definitely, that wolf spider had been MY roommate for almost 8 years! And I’m really happy that she knew that I couldn’t be having hundreds of her babies living in my bedroom! What a smart spider mother!
Since that time, I’ve moved that woodpile a couple of times and never have seen any more wolf spiders. (They are so fast! I probably don’t see them even though they are there.) In the summertime though, sometimes I’ll see what look to be little wolf spider ‘front doors’ to their homes along the side of my house. I’m always careful to not disturb them when I mow the lawn. (And of course I don’t use pesticides on or in my home and yard.)
I had a friend who stayed at my house a couple of years ago who had a vivid dream about me while sleeping near that folding door. In the dream, I had lots of ‘children’ living in my house. I smiled when I heard that dream, because I knew the dream was about all the wolf spider babies!
Love,
Connie – spider fairy-godmother
