Jumping spiders are, I think, generally agreed to be the cutest spider.
What makes an animal cute? Especially this representative of one of the most-feared animal groups, the spider?
It’s fuzzy, like a teddy bear. It has big eyes, like a baby fox. It holds its pedipalps, those little things that stick out on either side of the mouth and look like legs but aren’t, so politely, pointing down, like it’s trying to avoid upsetting you. It has a big cuddly abdomen and the fuzz makes its legs look less leggy, so it resembles, in shape if not in shininess, a beetle, politely going about its business, no creepy long legs here, taking up as little space as possible. Like it knows what people think about spiders, and it’s hoping we’ll understand that it’s not one of those spiders, it’s a nice spider.
Or maybe it’s more generous, trying to be an ambassador for all spiders – we’re not bad! Sure, some of my cousins have venom that can kill, but they don’t want to kill you. Spiders are a loving race. We come in peace. Please don’t squish us.
I met the spider above on a Sunday morning in April. It was on the wooden gate of a small Buddhist temple in the city of Takamatsu in Japan. This was the 83rd temple on my pilgrimage to 88 temples on the island of Shikoku, so I was nearly done, and I knew my way around some logistics by now – I was staying at a hotel by the train station with relatively comfortable beds, and taking trains part of the way to the temples. Number 83 was one of my easiest visits, so easy that it barely felt like it counted. The previous day had been a strenuous hike with two temples on top of a wooded plateau. But the trip to this temple was easy, a 20-minute train ride and then a 10-minute flat walk through suburbia.
When I arrived I sat on a bench, to get my candles and incense out of my backpack. The bench was against the temple’s modest wooden gate, and I noticed a jumping spider at eye level. Polite, fuzzy, big-eyed. Sweet. I spent a moment capturing its portrait, then I visited the temple’s two main halls, lighting my candles and incense and reading the mantras and the Heart Sutra at each, receiving a stamp in my stamp book and a pretty cloth bag, sewn by hand and left at the temple as part of the tradition of gifts for pilgrims. Like some other tiny temples I had been to, temple 83 felt homey and had a generous aura to it. I sat back down with the spider and rested, before taking off on the long walk back toward my hotel.
Now I’m back home in hot, steamy D.C. The other day when I got into my partner’s car, on the passenger side, a jumping spider got in with me. I tried to usher it out the door but it leapt away, under the seat. A few days later I got in again and noticed long wisps of silk from the rear-view mirror, reaching back toward the back of the passenger compartment. I didn’t know if a spider could have survived long in our terrible heat, though; in the days in between, the car had spent time parked in the sun, conditions that would be unsurvivable for a mammal.
But spiders are made of tougher stuff, even the cute, cuddly, fuzzy ones. The spider appeared, and I rolled down the window and nudged it outside.
Photo: Helen Fields, obviously
P.S. I was delighted to find, while getting this ready for posting, that we already have a category for jumping spiders, so I recommend that you go back and read all about Our Betsy’s obsession.
