Current mood:

exhausted

Don't judge...
Recently, a friend of mine was doing some cleanup and remodeling at his house. The prior owners had apparently decided to screen in the back patio as a weekend project and they didn't do a very good job, so he was ripping out some of it with the help of his parents.

As he peeled away some of the cheap siding, he saw a spider that looked to him like a black widow. He called his dad over and he confirmed that it looked like a black widow. His mother then wanted to look and she also agreed with the consensus. Sadly, before he could take a picture of it, my friend's father killed the spider.

While relating this story to me, my friend made a comment to me that my family, being from East Tennessee, probably would have kept it as a pet. My response was, "...did I tell you that story before?"

When I was growing up my grandparents found a black widow in the wood pile behind their house. They captured it and kept it in a jar on the window sill in the kitchen, feeding it the occasional fly. I had not actually told my friend this story before, so it made it even more amusing that his "crazy" suggestion based on stereotypes of people in East Tennessee turned out to be true. That being said, my family is very atypical for East Tennessee...