Her Name is Betsy

I had just arrived home from the weekend camping trip, and my companions and I were unloading he last of my gear when I noticed the note my son had left for me.

The note was actually taped to the top of one of my plastic storage containers into which he had taken the liberty of cutting an air-hole.

From his neat studently hand-printing I read:

“Hi Mom, I hope you had a great weekend? We had a wonderful time.”

A friendly enough greeting.

“By the way I brought home a new pet” (Not at all a surprise, knowing Matthew.)

“Her name is Betsy and I love her. You can take a peek, but please don’t kill her, mom, please.”

(Like I’m some kind of monster who goes around killing things, or what? All along , his love of little creatures has been strongly nurtured by me.)

So what could this little being be? I’m thinking its probably a small gray salamander or something.

I lift the lid to take a look at our new little Betsy, but she must be awfully small because I can’t see her amongst the grass and leaves of her new habitat..

The phone rings. I answer. Its Matthew.

“Hi Mom, how are you? Did you see my new pet?”

“Well, I looked in the box but couldn’t see anything. What is it?”

“Are you sure its not in there, MOM?”

“No, its not , What is it?”

“….silence…”   Now I’m very curious and getting somewhat uneasy.

“Matt there’s really nothing in there. Maybe it crawled out. What was it?”

“No, I think it was too big to crawl out.” (by now my skin is starting to crawl)

“It was a spider”

Alarms sound in my head as I mentally curl up my extremities and flee.

Physically, I’m rooted to the spot as I scan my surrounding for clues.

And then I see the evidence; I hadn’t noticed before.- a long strong silken thread running directly from the table-top to the back of the sofa.

“How big?”

“Pretty big.”

“Matt, you’d better get right home, right now and help me find this thing , or we’ll have to move”. He knows I’m not kidding too, I’m scared of spiders and could never stay living where a spider like that was loose. It might even have eggs and baby spiders.

“I’m on the way, I just have to wait for a bus”

That’s when I finally spot “Betsy” clinging unobtrusively to one leg of the coffee table, and she is big. ;She is shaped a lot like a blackish house spider but with an unexageratedd leg-span of about 4 inches.

“I found it, You just get home while I keep an eye on It. And hurry!”.

So there we sit, the spider and I

I discover I can keep her at bay by rumpling a newspaper. When I’m still for a while, she starts to make a run-for-it. Then I rustle the paper and she freezes for a few more minutes. We go on like this for 45 long minutes, each fearful of the other; till my fearless son comes in and rescues us both.