I was going to title this post using the word love. But when it comes to spiders love is too strong a word for me. I don't mind them, and I'm always the one in my family that has to catch them and release them outside, but to say I love them is a bit too strong. When I first met my wife, she was scared of any spider and even a small spider, what we call a money spider in the UK which is a spider the size of an ant, would set her running for cover. It's a little strange to be so frightened of spiders here in the UK as we have no dangerous ones. I think there are a couple of species that can give a little nip, but none have enough venom to do any damage to humans.
My wife and I have changed our attitude to spiders in recent years. Our oldest son, David, loved spiders, in fact he loved all bugs. I sometimes think the more scared people were of a particular creepy crawly, the more he liked them. He had wanted a tarantula for many years but we always said no. Little did I and my wife know that he secretly bought one with his birthday money, when he was in his late teens, and kept it in his bedroom. Fortunately my wife never found it. After he moved out of our house he had a couple of pet spiders, a tarantula and a baboon spider.
Sadly we lost our David back in 2008 in a tragic accident. He was 2 months shy of his 26th birthday when he died. I may write a more detailed account of what happened at a future date. I once wrote an article about losing him fairly shortly after it happened, which I posted on the now defunct Squidoom, but the article was lost when the company folded. I used to regularly have people contact me who had been through the same experience because they found my article helpful. But I would have to be in the right mood to rewrite it.
Anyway, back to spiders. Because of the connection between my son and spiders, my wife and I find comfort whenever we see one. And we have had spiders, of all sizes (never that big as we don't get big spiders in the UK) appear in many places and situations. Every time we see we one it makes us think of him. My with will say, "David's here". Don't misunderstand me. My wife and I are Christians, so we don't believe in reincarnation or anything like that. We just find it comforting and it brings a smile to our faces when we see one and makes us remember some of our son's antics.
My wife has also built up a collection of ornamental spiders which she has bought and people have given her. From a fluffy cute plush one to a quite realistic tarantula made of iron. We used to have the iron one on our living room wall, it would freak out some of our visitors.
The picture that I have put with this post is of a very large house spider that I photographed last week. She is one of the biggest I've seen. Actually, she reminds me of one David used to have in the corner of his bedroom when he was in his early teens. He would feed it with flies and it grew quite big.