For a period of time over Christmas and New Year I shared the kitchen bench with a huntsman spider. A small one. It seemed to like the compost bucket and I imagined it was eating the tiny flies that hover in there, providing an ‘ecosystem service’.
Sometimes it would be at the other end of the bench near the kettle. I took care not to harm it. It was not harming me. The one day it wasn’t there anymore. I missed it.
Yesterday I spotted two more. It was the end of a very hot weekend (35-36°C) for mid-March. (Just 10°C above average!) I think these two spiders, one in the kitchen and one on the inside of the upstair roller shutter, were trying to escape the heat.
On one level I can understand that people are frightened of spiders but on the other I can’t. But fear isn’t rational. Once I rescued a huntsman from a woman’s car. She could even go near the car she was so frightened. I went to the car and reached in to the spider, I must have had a container of some sort, but the spider ran past it and up my arm. I remember the incredible lightness of its touch.
If only we could touch the earth so lightly.