Meet Charlie. He could, actually, be a Charlotte, but considering that our house is full of rough n' tough testosterone, we assume he is a boy. Charlie lives in the window above my kitchen sink, spending his days traveling from one side to the other, occasionally "napping" up near the edge. Kevin and I spend a great deal of time watching him poke along with his little hairy legs moving purposely along the screen lining of the storm window.
I grew up here in Tennessee, and spiders do not scare me. If you do not live here, or if you have recently moved here, google "wolf spider" and you'll understand why this little guy doesn't bother me in the least. I don't like spiders and am by all accounts going to stomp anything that resembles a brown recluse or a black widow. But, I know how important spiders are to ecology in general. You don't have to be a Biology major to know their role.
So, as long as this little guy stays on his side of the window, I vow to do him no harm. He is welcome to capture and devour any stray fruit fly or ant that trys to infiltrate my home through this important portal to the motherload for insects: the kitchen. But as I was washing dishes yesterday, watching him scurry up towards the top of his perch, I wondered: am I going to kill Charlie, accidentally?
You see, this thought occured to me because I noticed a few dead ants at my back door earlier in the day. We have a pest control company come once a quarter and spray our house. I may not care about spiders, but I despise millipedes and centipedes, which are also unfortunately in abundance here in the wooded south. Oscar slaughtered one of these squirmy nasty creatures in Kevin's bedroom once soon after we moved in, and I would not have any more of them in the house. So I invite a man with a jug of pesticide into my house and I pay him $75 to spray like mad around...our doors and WINDOWS. When I saw the ants, I was so thankful that the "bug man" was here last month. Springtime comes and everything wants in the house. Yuck. But then, while watching Charlie, I wondered...am I killing his food supply? Surely he would not be munching on those ants, even if they did survive long enough to make it into the kitchen.
Am I purposely limiting his role in our world? Why even let him live in his little nook if I don't trust him to do his job? And what's to come of him? I routinely open this window to let in the breeze and thus far, Charlie has preferred to stay hidden at the top while it was open. But what if he decided to venture out, crossing the line of pesticide residue on the windowsill? That would be the end for him. Or what if some rogue insect managed to get across that chemical tripwire and into his territory? He would surely be posioned for doing nothing more than his natural obligation.
And, I get it. So what? He's a spider. A tiny little spider. He can't hurt anything, and he can't kill a millipede or a centipede, so who cares if he is here or not? The point is not whether I readily see his worth (which, I do!) but whether I am caring that my actions affect him at all. While Kevin is not quite old enough to understand the whole scenario, we do talk about Charlie and how he has a happy life (maybe? since he's starving...) and we need to respect that, since he is of no harm to us.
I can't help but project this situation onto some of the stories I hear of bullying now prevalent in schools. I often wonder about these bullies, as I'm sure you are aware, who are no longer just the "abused, neglected children" but often children from loving homes, with happy lives, and a bewildering lack of respect for other people. Simple teasing (think: boys chasing girls around playgrounds with some happy country song playing in the background) happens everwhere, but malicious tormenting of another child is beyond my comprehension. The best I can do is continue to teach my child to see that everything in God's world has worth, no creature was put here by mistake. And conversely to teach him that we need to protect ourselves from the ones that can harm us, and not simply allow them to do so just because they can.
The next time our "bug man" comes by, I will ask him NOT to spray the window above my kitchen sink. I think Charlie can handle that little area for now.
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