Spider Jesus

Warning: If you are a devout Christian who can’t enjoy a light riff on Jesus, you’d better skip this one.

During the glorious madness of Christmas Day, when our house was full of fourteen festive family members and three elderly dogs, I heard a voice above the high-decibel background. It was Homily, my daughter-in-law. She was saying in a controlled panic, Where’s Becky?

I was in the garage, where we keep the second fridge, fetching festive beverages. In case you’re thinking, why does a household of two with just one elderly dog need two fridges, well let me reply a bit defensively that the house originally had seven people when my mother-in-law would come and stay for very, very, very long periods. This was F’s mom, not Beau’s. F’s mom deserves a story of her own on this site. I call her the Raccoon, because she is strikingly beautiful and fierce. Her fur is so luxurious that you want to reach out and pet her, but you might die. She’s also exactly the size of a large raccoon.

I quickly retrieved the sparkling water or beer or whatever from the garage fridge---beverage details unimportant to the story---and sprinted up the stairs at a pace that belied my sixty-odd years and demonstrated my responsiveness to Homily's possible distress. Yes, dwellers of the flatland, our garage is a level below the main floor of our house, sixteen steps down. The house is built into a hill. Excellent for surviving floods, because we’re hundreds of feet above sea level. Good for cardio fitness, even on days you stay home. A horror story for anyone with mobility issues. Which will be us, one of these days.

Arms full of cold beverages, I met Homily at the door to the kitchen. She’d drawn Gnat to her side. The two of them, strongly bonded sisters-in-law, a matched set. Long brown hair, enviably thick, Hom’s wavy and Gnat’s stick-straight. They’re compact in height with hummingbird-quick minds, secure in their ability to speak up when they see injustice. Or need something.

I set the cold beverages on the counter. If this had been a Netflix series, the closed caption would have read, [ominous music].

Hom said, There’s a spider in the Christmas Tree. She looked genuinely concerned: big, round eyes, mouth set to a straight line. Then she added, I don’t feel safe.

Now, at first I thought she was genuinely frightened or at least put off by the spider. But when she said she didn’t feel safe I had to consider that she might be employing a comic technique called hyperbole. Maybe she wasn’t that scared. Or maybe she was just downplaying her fear by N95-ing it with dry humor. I wasn’t sure.

Gnat saw my hesitation, and cut through to the point, in that Gnat way that we all appreciate. Get rid of it, she said.

I think I mentioned that Gnat is the top candidate for Lead Alpha of the next generation.

I am one of the family spider-getters and, yes, I normally capture them and take them outside. For whatever reason, my fear responses are oddly wired, yet another way that my dog, Percy, and I are similar. He is not the least bit afraid of fireworks or thunder, and he once stepped casually over a large rattlesnake when we were out hiking. Not sure he even noticed the snake. Luckily Beau did. In one fluid motion he lunged forward, inserted the toe of his boot under Percy’s middle, and launched him several feet forward, well beyond the snake. Remarkably graceful feat, really. Percy was bewildered, completely unhurt, and to this day puzzled about how and why he flew for a few seconds, back in the day.

I walked over to the Christmas tree with the two glued-together young women. Bee’s maternal instincts kicked in, and she came over, too. She’s the one who thought to take the photo, and she’s the one who said a day later, You need to write a story about this.

There in our Christmas tree, aka Baby Redwood, was a good-sized brown spider. She was about an inch in diameter—including the legs. People often forget to say whether or not they’re including the legs, and I think that’s crucial. This spider had woven a classic web the size of a dinner plate. Remember the cursive writing example, glued along the top of the front wall in your first-grade classroom? This spider’s web was a model of a web, identical to the one on the wall of the first-grade classroom for spiders. It could have been the photo under the Spiderweb entry in Encyclopedia Brittanica. Or Wikipedia, if you’re a latter-day human.

Baby Redwood is next to a big window, and the web was beautifully illuminated. If only it had sported some dew, Beau could have photographed it and totally nailed the Beginner Nature category in his photo club competition. But we don’t have dew in our house—see discussion, below, of the fancy new air-handling system.

Now here’s where the tale takes a turn. My Poe perversion kicked in, and it is irresistible. It squelches all sensitivity to others. In this case, to Christians in general and my beloved Hom and Gnat in particular.

It’s Baby Jesus, I said. I leaned forward and addressed the spider, Happy birthday, Baby Jesus!

It’s worth noting that no one laughed. Except the Poe particles in my blood. They were cackling and careening merrily off the walls.

I turned to Hom and Gnat and said, We can’t disturb Baby Jesus on Christmas Day.

Bee said, perhaps to redirect the strange turn the conversation had taken, I think it’s a girl spider. And then, of course, we all thought of Charlotte’s Web, or maybe that was just me, and I said, Let’s see what Baby Jesus writes in the web. Perhaps she’ll write Merry Christmas, or at least Merry Xmas to conserve space and spider silk. It wasn’t a big tree.

Poe perversion had taken over my humanity. The Baby Jesus riff snuffed out all consideration for my family members while I goofed on the spider and blasphemed with abandon.

I continued, Perhaps it’s a…what do you call it? I splayed both hands out to my sides. Not stigmata. Visitation! It’s a visitation!

And then Poe went into remission, as suddenly as it had arisen. Riff over. I wandered to the kitchen to check the spreadsheet, the arbiter of the timing and scope of the feast. I forgot all about Baby Jesus and Hom and Gnat and the destructive madness I may have wrought.

Not saying that temporary Poe perversion and feast fixation are excuses. They’re not. I really do love Hom and Gnat, deeply and truly. As fiercely as a raccoon, and I'd defend them with my claws.

I even love Baby Jesus a little bit. At the next three ay-em wakeup, the intersection of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I found myself thinking about her. She really made a big sacrifice, very likely the ultimate sacrifice, in visiting us Christmas Day.

Baby Jesus sure wasn’t going to catch any bugs in our house. It’s insect-free this time of year, with windows tightly shut against the elements and doors opened only briefly to let the people and dogs in or out. We guard rigorously against the outdoors in the winter, minimizing the precarious dip to indoor temperature that might occur if the bitter cold air outside catches more than a glimpse of how nice and warm it is inside and tries to barge in.

In the summer we guard rigorously against the smoke, I'm sorry to say.

We installed a fancy new air handling system last March. Not only does it control the air temperature to within zero point zero zero two degrees (Fahrenheit! The small degrees!), but it also features HEPA filters and a whisper-quiet fan system to keep the air circulating healthfully. The HEPA filters, according to the accompanying literature, filter every size of undesirable airborne particle from covid virus to large bird.

The three ay-em ruminations went like this: Baby Jesus was not going to survive in our tree. What to do, what to do? I was not willing to get flies from the frog section of the pet store to feed her, because I’m just not that nice, which you already know. But trapping her and releasing her outside seemed fraught, too. Besides the frigid winter cold, it’s been raining for days and days, and shall be raining for more days and days, if you believe the weather report. I could put her under the rafters, but holy buddha, if Beau found out about that, he would be hopping mad. He already thinks we have an unholy number of spiders living in, on and around our house.

Furthermore, knowing Baby Jesus, she'd organize them, they'd grow in power, and take over the Senate.

Disaster scenarios are characteristic of three ay-em wakes; I’m aware of that. I figured I’d be smarter in the (later) morning, when my brain would be fully flushed of flotsam. Trusting I'd find a solution, I went back to sleep.

By the time the sun rose, Jesus was gone. Three days later, still no sign of her.

[This story is dedicated to Bee. Photo creds: Me, but Bee thought of it. ]