Encounters of the creepy kind

For the record, I Googled orb spiders to find a picture for this post but got too creeped out and had to close the page.

We all know that moms will do anything for their babies, right? Last weekend, I helped a friend clean up her deck where a bunch of her cardboard boxes had fallen victim to the recent rains. We pulled one of the boxes out from the wall and discovered a fat beige orb spider sitting on the other side of the box and crouching over what appeared to be an egg sac. My friend didn’t want to kill the spider so I coerced it onto a piece of cardboard and flung it a few feet over a four-foot cement wall that separates her deck from the grass. The grass on the other side was at the same height as the top of the cement wall (her apartment and deck are below ground level) so I watched the spider crawl away from us. The egg sac suffered a less fortunate fate and we continued breaking down boxes. About 10 minutes later, I turned around and that SAME spider was crawling back over the wall toward us. I’m no spider whisperer but she looked pretty angry. I might have screamed. Even though the spider obviously held a grudge, we nudged it back onto a piece of cardboard and flung her further this time. She didn’t return (at least in the next half hour while we were still there), so here’s hoping that neither of us will be haunted by mama spiders looking for their babies.