Retroactively, I am frightened.  I did something really scary this last month--something that I knew better than to do.  I just didn't make a critical connection that I should have made.  All my life I have been interested in bugs.  My first degree was in Zoology--with a concentration in entomology, which is the study of insects.  Who knows why that interests me.  I don't know.  It just does.  All bugs.

And I know which spider weaves a distinctive pattern for a web.  Especially the Black Widow--who weaves a random, scattered, undefined web characterized by it's seeming messiness--as if it got caught in a wind and blew apart.  Chaotic.  I know that.  I have found and studied many, many Black Widows.  The first one when I was 6 years old.  She had strung her messy web by the step on my back porch, and laid her clutch of eggs--which had hatched.  Babies running in every direction.

I made a garden back in Pryor, lined with concrete blocks--holes up--which was the perfect home for Black Widow spiders.  Dozens of them.  They like dark, cool places near a source of water.  I filled the holes with dirt and destroyed the spiders.  You don't want to give them an opportunity to nest.  They can kill you.  One of the men on our street was bitten and died.

However, the problem around here has been copperheads.  So, I have been carefully watching for copperheads when I change the filters in my Koi pump.  As a result, I didn't think much about the fact that there were strands of webs in the pump housing.  I had stuck my hand down in there a dozen times at least, and brushed away the stringy strands of cobwebs.  But this morning, my friend from next door (Dean) was getting ready to stick his hand down into the pump when he jumped back and said, "That's a Black Widow in the pump."  Sure enough, there she was in all her pitch black glory with a bright red hour-glass marking on her belly.  I had stuck my hand in her web a dozen times.

They are deceptive little critters.  And more dangerous than a copperhead because you don't see what it is that bites you.  How many times had God protected me from being bitten?!!  And I know what a BW web looks like.  I just let my guard down.  Thinking about one thing--copperheads--and not noticing another.  I walked right into a lion's den.  But like Daniel, God spared me and shut the mouth of the lion.  Like I said, if anyone should know about BW spiders, it's me.   These sneaky female buggers live everywhere in America.  They are the Devil's handmaiden.  She will even eat her mate.