For most of my life, I’ve never been someone who liked spiders. It wasn’t until a few summers ago that my weird spider love took root in me. Most of the time, when I saw a spider, I ran in the opposite direction (and sometimes, I still do). But a couple of summers ago, my mom noticed these big grass spiders had made their webs on the siding of our house and in the decorative wagon wheel under the kitchen window.
For the fun of it, I suggested that we name them. So, we jokingly named the ones we could see. Gradually, we found more and more grass spiders living on the outside of our house, and we named those ones too.
This is Homer chilling out in the wagon wheel.
After a while, I caught myself checking up on them and talking to them when I went outside. It’s funny how giving these creepy, crawly spiders names and talking to them like I would to my cat really endeared them to me. These days, I’m not nearly as afraid of spiders as I used to be.
I took this personal experience and incorporated it into my part of an entwined anthology that I’m a part of. My character in that book tries to take away her fear of things by giving them a name and making them known--taking away the mystery and ambiguity of the things that she fears by giving them names--which I kind of feel like is what I did with spiders.