One warm, Southern California day, the gas meter reader came to their yard while the girl was outside with her father. The gas meter was in the ground and covered by a cement slab. It was in the strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street and was surrounded by closely cut grass. When the slab came off a lot of spider webs filled the space.
Her father showed her a Daddy-Long-Legs spider and she could understand why it had that name. At first she held back from getting too close. The spider seemed big but it was not a hefty weight for an insect. It was not bold with a crispy-hard shell like a stinkbug. Her dad was reassuring when he said the only spider she had to be careful of was a Black Widow. You could tell what kind they were by a red hourglass on their stomachs. She knew what an hourglass looked like. Her grandmother had one in her kitchen to time boiled eggs.
The girl’s parents and grandparents took an interest in showing her things of nature, developing her curiosity, which would later be a major influence in who she was to become. Still as a young girl, somewhat older than the one who first discovered Daddy-Long-Legs spiders, she found tarantulas fascinating. They were huge, their legs very hairy, and they moved slowly but steadily along. These were found in a place not far from where she lived. On Sundays her family would go for a drive and occasionally visited friends who lived on the outskirts of town. It was a dry and dusty area and that was where she would see the tarantulas.
There were many of them walking down a gravel road and it seemed they might know where they were going. Their size dictated it was their territory and they had every right to be there even though the road was also occupied by farm trucks and family station wagons. Time has a different meaning when you are young. For a while she watched them as they marched along. Her two younger brothers wanted to throw rocks on top of the tarantulas but she wouldn’t let them. “You can’t kill them if they don’t hurt you,” she said with some authority.
Later, much later, she would get braver still. It happened after she was an adult and living in Seattle. She had been there for a few years, still acclimating to the constant rainfall that kept everything green and fresh, unlike the dusty earth of her youth. She had spent two years in a program learning photography and very much liked the subject. Her older, male instructor was a genius in her eyes and a fatherly figure to her. She wanted to learn everything he could teach her. The consistent dedication paid off with her expanding skills.
