The Shower Spider

One morning last July, I was halfway through a shower and covered in soap, when I saw that the quarter-sized, brown spider that lives behind the curtain had fallen into the water at the bottom of the tub.

I'm new to RV living and still haven’t figured out Serenity’s water heater, and though I could be using my solar shower, it takes more time, so I’ve been showering in the empty mobile home I'm parked next to. When I first went into the bathroom to clean it, the spider had been sitting at the back edge of the tub behind the curtain, with its badger-striped head and oak-leaf patterned back, plain as a small, brown fact.

I’d stood there with a rag in my hand and thought about evicting it, but it didn’t feel right. I was just a summer visitor, while the bathroom was the the spider’s home. And it wasn’t a threat to me, so I left it alone.

At first, it startled me whenever I pulled the curtain aside, and I suppose I startled it as well, but it was a calm spider, and just trooped patiently back into its white plastic tent. After a week or two, it stopped hiding when I came in, and it got so that I expected to see it there on the side of the tub and enjoyed its silent company.

As weeks passed, this grew into genuine affection on my part, and sometimes the hilarious desire to offer it treats like I did the neighbors dogs, or to stroke it’s back, neither of which I indulged. But its presence was a sweet reminder in a difficult time, an invitation to leave my lists and plans and problems for a while and be fully present to the living world, in which millions of other lives were unfolding all around me.

I learned that it was a wolf spider–not a web-spinner, but a wandering hunter, a nomad like I’m in the process of becoming. I pictured it leaving the tub each night and venturing into the vast, dark wilderness of the mobile home—slipping through caverns of old furniture, climbing mountains of boxes and buckets of paint as it hunted for dinner, evading predators, perhaps searching for a mate, then returning at dawn to the safety of the tub, exhausted from the night's adventures.

Once, when I was washing out a cooler in the tub, I forgot about the spider and swept the shower curtain aside, knocking it into the water, where it flailed helplessly as it was carried it towards the drain. Not quite daring to touch it, I fished it out with a wad of toilet paper and set it on the edge, watching in relief as it struggled free of the sodden tissue and staggered back into its shower curtain tent. I was more careful after that.

But this morning, by the time I saw that it had fallen in, it was floating just below the surface, motionless as an insect in amber. I scooped it out immediately, but it lay shapeless in my hand like a scrap of brown felt. I blotted the water from its body with a corner of toilet paper, then lay it on the window ledge and stroked each delicate leg back into place. When I was done, it looked like a spider again, but it still hadn’t moved, and I could feel something sinking inside, telling me I’d found it too late.

Still, there have been times in the past where I’ve fished a seemingly-dead insect out of water and it has recovered, so I nudged the spider into a patch of sun and finished my shower.

But when I got out, it still hadn’t moved, and I knew it was dead. I got dressed, reminding myself it was an accident and that it’s not my responsibility to take care of every living thing I encounter, but it didn’t help much. Why hadn’t I checked to make sure it was in its usual place, out of reach of the water that always pools in the tub? Why hadn’t I noticed it had fallen in sooner?

I’d been wrestling with gloom and anxiety all morning, but the rising sun and the blue blue sky and the excited chatter of nuthatches and jays feasting on pinon nuts had soothed me. Then I’d tidied up Serenity, something I enjoy because it fills me with gratitude for my new tiny home, which had also helped. By the time I was walking to the mobile home to shower, I’d found a sort of equilibrium and was feeling steady and capable, ready to tackle the challenges of the day.

But now as I walked back to Serenity, there was a gray slant to everything. The clock was ticking again and I was thinking of all that I still had to do before I could head south, of Helene and Milton—the smashed houses and tides of hungry brown flood water, the soaked, frightened people being pulled from floating cars, of how the second anniversary of a dear friend's death was a week away.

I got to work replacing a hose on Serenity’s freshwater tank and tried to make peace with what had happened. I decided that when I was done, I’d take the shower spider outside and put it somewhere beautiful, maybe under the hollyhocks or by the yellow flowers that grow next to the cedar, so that it could be taken back into the earth.

But when I went to get it, the windowsill was empty. There was a breeze coming through, and I figured it’s body had been blown to the floor, so I knelt and searched under the window, but found nothing.

I was on my knees by the sink when I saw it. The shower spider had climbed the molding and folded itself into the corner, legs piled together in front of its body like a tiny monk bowing over folded hands. In an instant, everything felt possible again.

“Namaste,” I said for both of us, and grinning like a fool, went back to my work with new energy.

The next morning, the spider was gone. Over the next few days I peeked behind the shower curtain a few times, but, perhaps wisely, it never returned to its old home. The weather had gotten cooler and I assumed it had retreated into some warm nook for winter the same way I was getting ready to retreat to Arizona.

I missed seeing it every day, but even its absence was a reminder of our wordless camaraderie and the spider’s surprising resurrection, and of how often I think the worst of a situation and end up being wrong. Once again, I’d been trusted with something precious—a few months of overlap with the life of another being, an invitation to consider the world from a completely different perspective, thus making my own that much wider, that much clearer.

I thought the story was finished then, and I wrote it down. My only regret was that I’d never gotten a photo. But this afternoon when I went into the mobile home for a sweatshirt, I saw a dark spot on the wall above the back door.

A moth, I thought, walking toward the door, or a spot of dirt. It can’t be. Its been weeks. But it was the shower spider, its badger-face and the soft browns and grays of its body as familiar as the smile of a friend.