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By Sheila Orysiek
 SAN DIEGO—I first noticed her one night when I happened to walk into the kitchen quite late. It was several hours after the supper dishes had been washed, put away, the sink and the countertops had been wiped and everything was nice and tidy. She was sitting on the windowsill and however she managed it sensed my presence. I am not sure how I looked to her, but I can describe how she looked to me. She was very small, almost minute, with a round body in the center and eight tiny legs all around. But, as small as she was, she was a complete being and knew everything there was to know about being a spider.
After seeing her several nights in a row, I named her LBF – Little Brown Friend. She made her home in the corner of the kitchen windowsill above the sink and spent her day waiting hopefully for food to drop by. While I was busy in the kitchen she tucked herself away in a safe spot. But, as soon as the activity calmed down, she felt safe enough to come out and spend some time on her front porch and watch me come into the kitchen for an occasional cookie. After several weeks she and I developed some protocols to our friendship and we learned to trust one another.
When I was busy tearing around the kitchen, flinging dough hither and thither and banging the pots and pans, she scooted back to the tiniest crack in the corner of the window frame and tucked in all her legs and stayed flat and hidden. But, when things were calm she would come out again and watch. At times when I knew that I would be spraying some cleaning chemical around, I would take the tip of my finger and give her a little shove and she would understand and scoot off and hide. I was also always very careful whenever I wiped the sill, to go around my little friend’s one inch front porch, and I am sure she appreciated that. So, our friendship continued.
She was such a tiny creature. It was hard to imagine that minute heart beating and blood, (of whatever color) coursing through her veins. Often I wondered what I must look like to her, certainly of monstrous size and very awkward, not at all organized with my arms and legs neatly arranged like hers. At
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first she seemed alien to me, but upon further reflection I realized we shared more than that which separated us. Her heart beats, she feels both hunger and contentment. She gets tired and rests. She breathes the same air I do, and probably has days when she doesn’t feel well; perhaps a headache or maybe her tummy hurts. Surely she knows fear. One thing I know for certain, G-D made both of us.
It became a habit of mine to go into the semi-lit kitchen before bed to say goodnight to LBF as she took a stroll around the sill of her/my window. Then, one night she wasn’t there. Diligently I searched; behind the faucets, under the knickknacks, in the swirls of the curtains. But the little brown spider was not to be seen. As my husband locked the kitchen door for the night I mentioned that I was looking for my friend. He grew very puzzled as he watched me. “Your friend,” he asked, “what friend?”
I carefully explained to him that a little brown spider lived on the windowsill and we had become friends – learning to trust one another over the last several weeks. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I saw it crawling on the counter – and squashed it.” I was really taken aback. Why would he do that? Of course, he thought I was jesting that the spider and I were friends. But the more I thought about it the sadder I became.
That little body had been crushed for no reason, except that it was easy to do. She must have felt fear and then terrible pain. Surely it would have been better to have taken a moment and carry the spider outside – or just leave it alone. There was no real reason to kill it, and yet that is often the first response of a human being. And this particular human being is one of the more peaceful of our species. That made me very sad and I can truly say that I miss that tiny mite of life, as wondrously made as I, and from the same Hand.
Most of us have no problem with obeying the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” We know that it is possible to kill unintentionally through some terrible accident and good people fear that possibility. Most of us extend that Commandment to include other forms of life such as animals not needed for food. But I think the Commandment can be extended further to include more alien forms of life such as insects and arachnids that all too routinely we squash without much thought.
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