The last time Flora stayed here she told us she was NOT sleeping in the basement because there were spiders in the basement. I was slightly amused and also had no answer because she was right, there were spiders in the basement. The basement bathroom seems to the be place spiders flourish, they grew extra large in the basement bathroom.
When I first found them years ago I would just squash them with a thick wad of toilet paper then flush them down the toilet. A rather harsh treatment for an innocent creature I did think, but it was a spider and it was rather large and quite ugly and I didn't want to share my bathroom with them. Then I read that spiders were actually helpful to humans because they ate other smaller insects that were bad to have around the house. This didn't make them any smaller or less ugly in my eyes but it gave me a little extra guilt for squashing them. So then I would put a cup over them and then slide a stiff piece of paper under the cup and carefully carry the cup and paper upstairs to toss the spider outside hoping the paper and cup seal would not be broken along the way. This made me feel better about the spiders in the basement. Now I was freeing them into the natural habitat and who knows how much they were thankful for getting them out of our basement and into the real world. I imagined a whole new life unfolded to them instead of a sudden death and then being washed away into the worst place on earth- a sewage pipe. Although I did wonder how well they faired when I threw them out into the snow on a freezing winter day, but still, it might have been a shock, but better than being squished and flushed right?
All was fine with this plan until one day recently I read that moving a house spider to the outside is basically a death sentence to a house spider. I had no idea. Now I had to rethink my plan, I guess as long as it was just me and the spider I could live with him if he could live with me. No one else used the basement bathroom so I decided to just let the spider be. Most of the time the spider is in the shower which is opposite the toilet and I see him there when using the bathroom. Sometimes I say a few words to him, nothing deep, just small talk. He never answers and rarely moves which is OK with me because when he starts moving is when I get the urge to squish him again. Moving slow is OK but moving fast seems a little intimidating to me so I'm glad he almost always moves slowly. I really don't know if I'm talking to the same spider over a period of time or if they live and die in a short period of time and I'm talking to a descendent of the one I saw last month. I really doesn't matter, they all look and act alike as I never can pick out any identifying characteristics.
Now I share the shower with them, I just tell him that if he leaves me a long, I will leave him alone. The smart ones hide behind the shower curtain while the shower is going. They seem to survive OK that way. The not so smart ones don't go behind the shower curtain and apparently can't take the water because if they get too wet they die. I thought at first they were just shriveled up to protect themselves from the water and would be fine as soon as they dried out but no, they don't revive once they get all rolled up in a ball from the water. Kind of surprised at that since once as a child I saw a spider walking around under water in the bottom of the bathtub and it seemed unfazed by the water and I was very frightened of the fact that the spider was so invincible. So the drowned ones end up going down the drain in the shower anyway, but at least I didn't squash them and put them there, they sort of did it to themselves.
Lately I've noticed a large spider on several occasions in the shower while I visited the bathroom and began to wonder if maybe he was stuck in there, maybe he tumbled in and the sides are too slippery to climb back out. That would be a rather unpleasant death I thought, starving to death in a shower stall because you couldn't climb out. There's probably not much to eat in there. I didn't really know if he was stuck or not but the fact that he was in there for several days made me think he might be. Now I don't want to handle the spider, you know the old cup and paper routine, but I did want to give him a chance to get out on his own so he could go wherever spiders go when they go home for the night so I devised a simple plan to let him leave if he wanted to. I took a few sheets of toilet paper, long enough to drape over the raised shower edge and it touched the shower stall floor on one side and the bathroom floor on the other side, I called it my paper trail. This way the spider could simply climb up the paper trail and over the low shower wall then down to the floor and freedom. Seemed like a good idea to me. The first time I did it the spider just hid under the paper, obviously this spider was not too bright, or my theory that he wanted out was wrong. Either way I'm not sure if he ever got out or if he was one of the drowned ones. It's not like I know them by name. Just the other day though I put out the paper trail again and this morning it appears the spider is gone out of the shower stall. He may be home at this very minute telling his family the horrifying story of being stuck in the shower stall and warning them to never go there. On the other hand, he may have fallen into the floor drain in the shower and perished. Or worse yet, his life in the shower stall was so bleak and he was so emaciated from lack of food that he flung himself to his death into the drain on purpose. I'll never know, and really, I shouldn't waste what precious few functioning brain cells I have left thinking this much about spiders.
