Spider in my shower…

     Tonight, as i set about waiting for the lukewarm water in the shower to heat up I noticed something strange.  In the corner behind the showerhead was a tiny gray/white/brown spider.  My instant reaction was to cup my hands beneath the falling water, bite my lip on a squeal, and heave the handful at the poor aracnid.  Simply for being in my shower…which isn’t even mine…which he crawled into long before me.  Luckily the spider was not washed away to watery oblivion.  He dangled from the flimsy-strong thread of a web begun.

     For a short time he simply hung there, waterlogged no doubt, and then he gripped at the tile and began trying to climb the wall.  Every time he would make a little progress, he would slip on the water and drop hurriedly down to the end of his rope.  For several moments he did this without pause, and I watched, hardly noticing the temperature rise in the water.  When he finally did rest, he was about halfway up the same tile he’d been climbing, at about the same spot where he would soon sip and fall, and of course I had to wonder at the resiliance of this spider.

     Didn’t he know he’d been climbing and climbing only to slip and fall?  Didn’t he know he wasn’t getting anywhere?  Didn’t he know that the only way he could possibly go anyplace at all would be to go down?  Down was the simple solution.  Down made sense to me.  He could wait at the bottom until the shower dried.  Or he could scuttle across and out of the shower altogether, thereby evading danger altogether.  I certainly would have liked him to leave.

    Of course, I wanted to heave more water at him, to sink the little sucker right down the drain and out of my worries, but I didn’t.  I turned my back on him and washed my hair, glancing over my shoulder every now and again to investigate his progress.  Every time I looked he was no higher or lower than when I saw him last.  I couldn’t help being impressed.  I would have gone down.

     It still amazes me that the only thing I fear from spiders is that they will crawl on me, and possibly get lost in my hair and hatch thousands of spider babies that will eventually devour me whole.  Of course that could just be my imagination going wild…maybe.

     I just can’t believe how incredibly determined this spider was.  I wanted to learn from him.  I want to persue something with that kind of dedication.  Sitting here now pondering this spider, I’ll bet he’s still on that wall, trying to climb up.  He’s so tiny, and his greatest advisary, the wall, is beating him at every step (with some help from me and a handful of water) but he keeps taking steps.  I’ll always admire that. 

     Don’t ask me why a spider in my shower at 12:30 at night inspired me to write this long and probably tedious entry.  It just did.  What does this mean for my life?  Nothing.  Will i try harder to overcomne adversity?  Maybe.  But I do know that this image will be burned into my brain for the rest of my life.  It’s one of the strange phenomena of memory.

     Oh well.  I’ll leave you with a little poem.  Perhaps you know it…

The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout.

Down came the rain and washed the spider out.

Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,

And the itsy bitsy spider, climbed up the spout again.