Arachnophobia

One day my father-in-law brought in a black widow spider that he’d captured in the front garden, in a mason jar. He couldn’t just leave her: at the time we had a toddler living upstairs. I don’t know why he didn’t just smush her.

I am a moosh for all animals, so instead of leaving her in an unpunctured jar with a few blades of grass, I set up a little plastic terrarium with climbing sticks and a hidey tube and kept her as a pet. My wife named her Becky, the softest, most unassuming name she could think of for a dangerously venomous predator.

Black widow spiders are actually quite shy, but Becky soon stopped being scared of us, and would position herself expectantly under the top hatch whenever I opened it to dump in whatever housefly or stinkbug had unwisely invaded our home.

In the winter I would buy her feeder crickets from the pet store, which was always a fun conversation. (“Oh, what do you have?” “Black widow spider.” “Oh!”) It was a gleeful day for both of us when I scraped in the early formings of a wasps’ nest from under the patio table. Well, I’m not a moosh for all animals.

Becky lived for three years before passing from old age, becoming very much larger and quite a bit older than she would have in the front garden. But while she was still with us I wrote her into the fourth issue of my comic, still funding on Kickstarter!

Well, more or less.