For over a year, a spider lived inside our car’s driver-side mirror.
I suppose it might not have been the same spider the entire time. It might have been an entire intergenerational spider-family.
I’m sure that the spider (or spiders) lived there, somewhere in the gears that adjusted the tilt of the mirror, rather than paying an occasional visit, because of their omnipresent web.
It didn’t matter if the previous web had been whipped off by Wellington’s world-famous wind, rained off by Wellington’s prodigious mid-day and all-night storms, or just gradually worn away over the course of a drive on the highway. By the next time I left the house via car, the web would be back in full force.
Image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay
I brushed the web away the first few times I noticed it, until it dawned on me that the same spider must be deliberately spinning it again and again. At first I was a little bit grossed out. Eek, a spider! Lurking right outside my power window!
Yet, what was that spider going to do to me? The mirror was controlled electronically from inside the car. The web didn’t especially obscure the mirror, and at high speeds it quickly dissolved. I had never actually seen the spider, even when brushing off its web early on in its residence. It had found an apparently cozy little artificial burrow that would protect it from predators. Apparently it was eating decently enough on the bugs that would get tangled in the mirror itself, though I never saw any evidence of those, either.
All I knew was that there was a fresh web on the mirror every time I get in the car.
(I suppose there might have been some amount of spider-leavings going on behind the mirror, but I assumed that between the rain and the occasional electronic adjustment it was effectively self-cleaning. Either that, or we had a very tidy spider. No, I don’t want to consider the alternative. Moving on…)
This grew to be part of my daily landscape in Wellington. I saw my family every day. I ran into the same parents at school pickup. I chatted with the same cashiers every weekend at the supermarket. And, every time I arrived at my driver’s side door I would note that the web had been recast from the last time I saw it.
Then, disaster struck. Not all at once, mind you, but a disastrous chain of events began to unspool.
At some point in the process of moving from our old house to this one, the driver’s side mirror took a nasty bump that snapped it backward on its swiveling joint. (This is a common injury on Wellington’s tight streets.) The mirror still sat squarely without risk of toppling, but the electronic mechanism had died.
Apparently the short, sharp shock had no negative effect on my spider-friend. New webs continued at our new house. I hoped that the insect live would be lively enough here. It seemed much less-buggy to me at our new house than it had been at our house that was higher up and nearer to the shoreline.
I am 9 times out of 10 the driver of our car, and for a while I was fine with the mirror’s unadjustable state. However, we were due to have family visit (this was pre-pandemic), and E would be using her one time of car driving to ferry everyone to a camping trip. (Without me: I don’t camp; I stay in lovely full accommodations with electricity and wifi adjacent to outdoor activities). I didn’t want her to be stuck with a non-adjustable mirror with a car full of people we love.
Without giving much thought to my spider-friend, I brought the car in to have the mirror replaced.
My error became apparent as soon as I was called back into the service bay to give the car a once-over. They hadn’t washed the entire car, but my brand-new mirror was gleaming and webless. There was no way I could’ve warned the spider that its home was about to be removed and callously discarded onto a pile of spare parts. I had never even seen it, so there was little chance of me coaxing it out and capturing it.
I suppose I could’ve begged for a crowbar from the car repair people, pried the face of the mirror off just before the repair, and scooped the spider into a little jar for safekeeping. Or, I could’ve asked for my broken mirror back after the repair, brought it back to the house, and set it down next to the car in the hopes that my spider would have the wits to re-home itself.
Or I could simply get used to web being gone, to the idea of driving alone, again. It was only a spider. An unseen spider.
It has been over two-and-half years since getting that mirror replaced, and I still think about that spider. I always meant to write about it while it was still living in the mirror – to take a photo of its makeshift mobile home. I even had the title of this post jotted down in the margins of a notebook. I never got around to it.
Sometimes when make a minor, necessary change, you underestimate what small interconnected comforts it might eliminate – even if those comforts were never much of a comfort at all, and were instead an odd, useless, little habit that helped propel you through your day.
Sometimes the things you assume will last forever and aren’t worth commenting upon are the most ephemeral.
Sometimes its just a spider in the mirror.