Give Me Something Good to Eat

When I get restless I go walk circles around my neighborhood in the evening.  Usually I am on autopilot, walking wherever the sidewalk takes me and not worrying too hard about Mother Nature.  The other night I did that and nearly walked into a HUGE spider web.  It was stretched from tree to sidewalk to mailbox and hosted an appropriately sized spider approximately the size of a basketball.  It wasn't your standard cobweb.  It was a deadly trap.

I have come to peace with a lot of my fears.  I have the courage to talk in front of a crowd, look over the edge of a high building, and am comfortable with the traditional icky things like blood, guts, small rodents, and snakes.  But spiders?  Uh-uh.  I consider it a personal victory I have let the pea sized one live on the outside corner of my garage door for the past week.

So maybe I have uncovered some restraint in my arachnophobic soul and mastered the Art of Not Squishing the small spiders.  They are supposed to be good for the environment and I like the environment so I can work to be okay with them.  But the HUGE ASS spider right in my way on my nightly haunt of the neighborhood waiting for me to walk into his web so he can wrap me up in a cocoon for later?  NOT COOL AT ALL.  I might avoid that particular cul-de-sac for the next year.  I can only be grateful Mr. Spider chose to build his web where I could see it underneath a bright streetlight, presumably to catch all the tasty light loving bugs that hang around there.

Of course I know Mr. Spider's real secret.  He is obviously staking out his spot for Halloween night when he is going to catch all the small and juicy trick-or-treaters in his web.