From the chair on my front porch this morning, the world looks as if it’s stitched together by strands of spider web. The piercing September sun shimmers on webs that crisscross the lawn and thread together the branches of the big oak tree all the way up to its topmost limbs. Web lines connect the bird feeder to the porch post, the post to the porch beams, and the whole porch to the twigs of the dead oak branch where the chickadees and cardinals wait for their turn at the bird feeder. If I sat here long enough, I’d probably be stitched into this chair.

 I’m generally in favor of spiders, inside as well as out. They catch flies, mosquitoes, moths, and keep the house free of flying insects, although I don’t much like those hard-to-clean black and white specks and the bug carcasses that fall on every horizontal surface below their webs.

I feel horribly guilty when I suck a spider up into my vacuum. I envision it whooshing down the hose and slamming into the debris in the vacuum bag. Sometimes I picture the spider living in there the way I used to imagine a cherry tree growing in my stomach after I’d swallowed a pit. I guess I inherited this tenderness for small, helpless creatures from my mother. She has a hypersensitivity to the fate of insects and the young of any species.

When I was four years old, a spider came to live on the curtains of the window over my bed. I still have a living, full-color image of the gauzy fabric on the day the spider’s web sack released hundreds of tiny spider babies across the curtain and down toward my bed. It’s possible that memory is mixed up with my image from Charlotte’s Web, in which Charlotte’s eggs hatch and each new miniature spider hangs on a silken thread, silhouetted in the doorway of the barn. I hated having to share my bedroom with a spider family, and I couldn’t understand my mother’s indifference to my horror of spiders. But now I understand, because I’m just like her.

When my son was little, he also had a great fear of spiders or anything that crawled. Now that he’s big, he is able to capture a spider under a glass, but then I’m called in to remove it. I suppose it’s my own fault for insisting on the rights of eight-legged creatures. About four years ago, I bought a pair of geckos, with only four legs each, to live in our greenhouse, which opens onto our living room through a set of French doors. I didn’t tell my son because I was afraid he would refuse to come out of his bedroom ever again. The geckos disappeared after a few months – into the house, I feared, but I never saw them again, except one time a year later when one was sunning itself on the greenhouse windowsill. I never found out where they went; maybe we’re still living with them! I’m glad I never told my son.

As I look around the edges of the ceiling where I haven’t vacuumed in a couple of months, I see spiders every foot or two. I wonder how big their territories are and if they all agree to smaller ones when their population grows. What happens when they get overcrowded? But then I think: I don’t really want to know so much about them, because the chances are that I’ll vacuum them up before long.

It’s a mistake to get too personal with critters you’re going to kill. When I was a kid, my family got a backyard lamb after we moved into town from living on a farm – no doubt my father’s idea. When it came time to kill Lambchop, all of us kids swore we wouldn’t eat any of the meat. We ended up swapping him with another family who had gotten a lamb at the same time. We ate that one because we didn’t know him.

I don’t like to kill any living creature. I trap mice in a Hav-a-Heart trap and let them go a couple of miles down the road. I’ve read that they’re likely to die after being abducted from their home territory and that makes me feel bad, but less guilty than killing them outright. This is the ninth day in a row I’ve caught a mouse in the trap. They seem to be in endless supply, just like spiders.

As a gardener, I’ve become ruthless over the years, and can kill insects with my bare hands, except for the huge luminous horned tomato worms. They’re so magnificent that I can’t bear to murder them with my bare hands. I drop them into a bucket of water where they turn brown and bloated. It’s weeks before I can make myself empty the bucket.

Every autumn, aphids colonize the vegetables I grow in my greenhouse. If I leave them alone, sooner or later the ecosystem reaches a balanced state between aphids and aphid predators. However, there aren’t any natural spider predators in my house, and I’m not about to let birds live in here. I wonder if a balanced state could ever be reached between humans and spiders. Somehow I don’t imagine I’m tolerant enough to allow spiders to find their optimum population level. And for lack of other predators, I guess my vacuum and I will have to fulfill the duties of that ecological niche.