“I killed it with a Birkenstock,” I said, beaming, as I described having whacked a light brown fuzzy tarantula, the size of half a tennis ball, in defense of the bathtub toys. Then I explained how, brave with the fortitude of motherhood, I scooped the still beast with a shoe box lid into a shoe box and threw it over the wall into the wash—the wildlife area behind our house that was supposed to keep things out, not let them in.
“You’re not supposed to kill them,” my neighbor said slowly, as if to scold me.
She had her hands on her hips and very well may have said we weren’t allowed to kill them, but I tuned her out after “not.” If anything other than my two-year and six-year-olds were going crawl around that bathtub, I was going to have something to say about it.
When I saw that tarantula in the tub, I knew the Southwest was not the place for me. My fourth interstate move in eight years for my then-husband’s work, I relocated with ease—packing and unpacking boxes, driving cross-country, finding schools, kids’ playmates, dry cleaners, take-out Chinese—but acclimating to the desert mentality was a different story. It wasn’t so much the tarantula as the fact that I wasn’t supposed to have killed it that brought me face to face with the reality that I was indifferent to the wildlife around me and not only at odds with nature, but with my neighbors.
I grew up stepping on ants and over cracks, squashing spiders, and spraying bees in the brick cityscape of a Philadelphia row house neighborhood. The view consisted of attached rooftops, telephone wires strewn with Converse sneakers, and a limited sky. In the desert Southwest it was still all gray and brown all around me, but it was nature, not construction. Above my faux adobe home was where the sky wrapped around the world—I was sure of it. Every night magenta and mandarin sunsets cascaded over the western horizon and looked like a watercolor painting. It took my breath away in much the same way as a childhood game of hide and seek. I knew what was coming, but each time met it with excitement and authentic surprise. If I could have lived there and never looked down it would have been close to perfect.
