I learned a few months ago from my Aunt Ellen that spiders inside your house are much easier to tolerate if you give them names. I laughed at her idea and her quirky stories of the spiders that have lived inside her houses. A few weeks after that conversation David and I were greeted with our own house spider. We are the sort of people who normally kill spiders inside our house but this particular spider was small, lived on the ceiling of our bedroom, and seemed quite harmless. He moved to the corner of the wall during the night and would hang out above our bed during the day. We named him Clarence. He lived in our room for weeks harmlessly moving around in his back and forth pattern and mostly just ignoring us. We scolded him when he occasionally moved out of his pattern. There was a time two weeks ago or so when we thought that Clarence might be dead because he didn’t move at all for days. But we breathed relief when he moved after David blew on him a few times. Last week, however, Clarence must have finally realized that there is no food to be found in our bedroom and moved to the door of the linen closet in our bathroom. He has been there for days. But that isn’t where he was today.
Today, as I was preparing to take a shower I opened the shower door and there was Clarence. He looked so innocent crawling around on the shower wall. There I was all naked and helpless and wanting to take a shower. So I did what any other person might do in my situation. I picked up a shoe and I killed him. He didn’t even move, poor little fella. I think that he had become quite indifferent towards our presence and perhaps too trusting. Sorry little spider, but you had just gone too far.