The Tragic Tale of Penelope



          My proclivity towards keeping poisonous pets all started when we first moved to Boise, ID.  There was a period of a month or so where we were waiting to move into our house.  We didn't want to stay in a hotel that long so we rented a little house that has since been demolished.  We called it the spider house.  There was one room we didn't even go into for fear of being carried off to the forest. Just like in Harry Potter.  We did a lot of cleaning to make the place inhabitable.  As we cleaned, we found a black widow. From then on, we fed every spider we found to her.  It was pretty cool to have a little nature show in our house.  As I recall, when we moved out we left her on the counter.  Surprise new tenants!

        From then on, I have always thought they were so cool.  Last summer we found two black widows.  One was in our kitchen and one was right outside our front door.  Any normal person would kill them and consider the world a better place.  Not Louis and I!  We caught them and put them in a vase in our kitchen.  We would feed them beetles, moths, other spiders, and crickets from the petstore when we couldn't find other bugs. I am surprised that they never ate eachother. 

          We named them Penelope and Persephone.  I worried about the two of them being in the same vase because Penelope was kind of a bully and would steal all of the food.  Persephone was smaller so she couldn't fight back very well.  I eventually separated them.  This way I could make sure they each had enough to eat.  Turns out that Penelope was a truly stupid spider.  I would get things stuck in the web for her and she would kind of try to wrap them up and the she would just forget about them.  Persephone, on the other hand was a master hunter.  I didn't have to get the bugs stuck in her web and she would quickly wrap them up and suck them dry.  She would then cut them down from her web when she was finished eating.  Penelope begin to get thinner and thinner because she wasn't eating.  I tried feeding her small defenseless bugs, but it was all to no avail.  She just couldn't catch anything.  I was getting desperate, so I put them back together, in hopes that Persephone would do all of the work and then Penelope would steal the food.  It didn't work.  One morning, I found Penelope dead, all shriveled up.

          She didn't actually die from a freak bungee jumping accident, but it was stupidity that killed her. Here are the condolences I received from Louis' mom. "Dear Louis and Katie, Even the elephants aresad that your black widow has died.  (There were elephants on the front of the card and they were clearly mourning).  Why does the black widow kill the male after mating? So she doesn't have to hear the snoring.  What do you call the man with a shovel stuck in his head? Doug. Anyhow, I thought I'd send a check because you are grieving.  I was going to donate to the Black Widow Society, but I didn't have the address." What a beautiful, thoughtful note. Penelope would have laughed at the jokes.  We will probably spend the money on a headstone that will remind us of her forever.