Sit back, relax, and let me tell you a Spider story

Growing up in the Mystic section of Groton,I attended elementary school at Northeast Elementary on Flanders road. When I was in the third grade (1967) like every kid out there, I was afraid of nothing and loved the Natural world. 

I remember being a kid and spending many a day sitting on the ground examining the moss, undergrowth and things that crawl over it, also ponds, streams, and things that swim in them. When was the last time you thought of  salamanders or tadpoles, or frog eggs. The things that were magical to kids. But I digress.

During morning recess, remember recess? I love recess, we should still have recess...and lunch in a play ground..and Summer off!!!! God I miss school, (Hated it at the time).

Well, during a morning recess I walked out into one of the fields (which by the way were off limits), and I found spread out between the waving field grasses and weeds, Spider webs. These were not like the spider webs we had under the mail box, or under the lip of the house to the basement, these were humongous, (Hey, I was 7)  In each web was the largest, (7), most beautifully colored spider I had ever seen, Black and  Yellow Garden Spiders. 

They were cool, so I reached up. using my thumbs and fore fingers, grabbing them by the body, I removed them from their homes. I walked back across the playground, spider on each arm, in through the doors and into class. I had a seat and waited. The other kids in class thought I was cool.

All was great, spiders walking on me, walking on desk, the other kids gathered around checking them out. Then...it all came to an end, Miss Thompson walked in the room, never saw her coming. never heard her coming. She looked over the throng of kids to check out the commotion, The Shriek was intensive, and after much yelling and pulling of kids away. She instructed me to, "Remove those from the building", so I took my appreciated  friends back out to the field, and replaced them in their webs, I am not sure if I had the correct webs but either both of my crawly friends carried on as if nothing had happened, or they both went into panic mode being placed in another spiders web, I will never know, but hey, I had a 50/50 shot at being right. I remember those spiders as being huge, they took up over half the width of my arm at the time, but then...I was 7 years old.

The spiders are a lot smaller now, and I am a lot bigger, but the funny thing is, I wouldn't pick one up now if I had to, I hate spiders...

I also don't lay in the grass looking at things that crawl any more...because in the grass...there are "things that crawl".

So... How old are we when we learn to fear what we once thought was cool...is it something we automatically learn, or is it taught to us by fearful people?

Yeah...by the way...

I hate him too, there's just something not right about him.


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