There is a spider in my window today, and I want it on record that I did not invite it.
I found it this morning in the usual way I find everything important, which is by nearly walking face-first into it. The windowsill in the back room is mine. It has been mine since before I can be bothered to remember, it gets the good early light, and it is exactly the right width for me to arrange myself along in the specific folded shape I prefer, with my chin over the edge like something posed for a portrait nobody asked me to sit for. I go there most mornings. I went there this morning. And in the corner, between the frame and the glass, in the exact spot where my left shoulder usually goes, there was a web.
Small. Efficient. Slightly damp-looking, the way things look when they were built overnight while everyone respectable was asleep. And in the middle of it, doing absolutely nothing, sat the spider.
I want to be clear that I did not panic. I have panicked before, on other occasions, for other reasons, and I know what that feels like, and this was not it. What I did was back away with tremendous dignity and reassess the entire situation from a distance of about four feet, which is a completely different thing.
My first read on it was hostile. Somebody had moved into my window without asking. I don’t get consulted on much in this house — the chair gets relocated, the box on the bottom shelf remains sealed and unexplained, doors close on rooms I have every right to be in — but the window was supposed to be different. The window was mine by long occupancy and I had never once had to defend it, because nothing had ever been foolish enough to challenge me for it. Until today, apparently.
I sat and watched it for a long time. It did not do anything provocative. It did not do anything at all, actually, which somehow made it worse — there is a kind of confidence in sitting completely still in someone else’s window that I found deeply suspicious. I have sat completely still in a great many places myself and I know exactly what it communicates. It communicates ownership.
So I did what any reasonable animal would do, which was test it. One paw, very slow, very controlled, extended toward the outer strand of the web where it anchored to the frame. The thread gave slightly and sprang back, and a little shiver went through the whole structure, all the way to the middle where the spider sat, and the spider did not move an inch. I withdrew my paw. This felt like a draw. I did not love that it felt like a draw.
I went and found my human to report the incursion. She was at the kitchen table with her coffee, and I did the thing where I stand at her ankle and look meaningfully back over my shoulder toward the room in question, a gesture that has worked for me before regarding moths, unfamiliar noises, and at least one unexplained draft. She followed me in, which felt like validation, and then she crouched down and looked at the corner of the window and said, “oh, hi,” in a voice I did not care for at all — warm, almost delighted, the voice she uses for things she’s decided to like.
She did not remove it. I watched her not remove it, with my own eyes, standing right there. She said something about how it probably wasn’t hurting anything and there’d been a lot of gnats getting in through the screen lately, and then she went back to her coffee, entirely unbothered, as if a stranger setting up permanent residence in a load-bearing corner of my window were a minor administrative matter and not the outrage it clearly was.
I sulked on the bed for a while after that. Not because I was upset. I was thinking. There is a difference, and I would ask that it be recorded as such.
By the middle of the afternoon I had gone back to check on it, because a good watch requires ongoing surveillance and not simply a single dramatic confrontation followed by abandonment of the post. The web had grown slightly. There was, I noted with some satisfaction, a small dead thing wrapped up in the corner of it that had definitely not been there before — something with wings, now folded into a neat gray parcel — and the spider had moved a few threads closer to it, in the unhurried way of something that knows it isn’t going anywhere.
I found this development difficult to argue with. Whatever else was true about the situation, the thing was working. It was catching the exact kind of small flying nuisance that gets in through the gap in the screen and ends up ticking against the lampshade at unreasonable hours, driving me to feats of pursuit that end, more often than I’d like, with something on the bedside table getting knocked over. If the spider wanted to sit in my corner intercepting those before they ever reached my airspace, I found myself less and less inclined to file a formal objection.
I would like to say the shift in my thinking was gradual and considered. It was not. It happened somewhere around the fourth or fifth time I checked in on the thing over the course of the afternoon, each visit slightly less hostile than the last, until at some point in the early evening I caught myself sitting in my usual folded shape along the sill with my shoulder a respectful two inches from the web instead of directly through it, and I realized I had, without ever formally deciding to, started guarding it instead of the other way around.
This is not a surrender. I want that understood. A surrender would mean the spider won something, and the spider did not win anything, because the window was never actually its window, it is renting the corner of my window under an arrangement I have quietly and unilaterally approved, an arrangement that could be revoked at any time, by me, should the spider’s behavior change or should it, for instance, get any ideas about the rest of the sill.
My human came by around evening and found me stationed there, watching the corner with what she probably read as suspicion and what was actually something closer to supervision. She scratched behind my ears and said something about how she was glad I’d made a friend, which is not what happened, and I let it go because correcting her felt like more effort than the moment deserved.
Tonight I am staying in the window a little later than usual. Not because of the spider. Because the light does something nice there in the evening, gold and slow along the sill, and it happens to fall right across both of us, and if a fly gets stupid enough to come in through the gap in the screen tonight, it will have two of us to deal with instead of one, and I have decided, privately, that I am fine with those odds.