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COLUMN: The spider and the ant

───   10:20 Tue, 07 Feb 2017

COLUMN: The spider and the ant | News Article

There seems to be a political drama playing itself out in my house and I am in awe about how nature can remind us how these kinds of situations are or can turn out.


My son captured two spiders the other day. He spent a whole day converting his old fish tank into a spider house. I did what I normally do when I am not sure how to handle a situation – I said nothing. Just said to myself this s***t is not going down.

But it was. Soon my son excitedly gave me hourly updates on the spider situation. I listened, I nodded. I won’t entertain it, I won’t entertain it.

I, however, could not help to wonder why this kid, who is a wealth of useless information, does not know everything yet about the spider situation. 

He was quick to tell me: “The one is a rain spider, but I am not sure what type of spider the other one is. I decided they need to eat and was not sure what to feed them. So I left some leaves and a couple of cockroaches in the tank.

This puzzled me. Usually, he would know everything there is to know about the topic of the week. Something would happen and he would leech onto it. 

That would be the crux of our conversation – during morning coffee, in the car to school and just as I thought he forgot about it… it would resurface on our way back home or right in the middle of an important scene of whatever is on the TV… until something else happens.

I think he was just too busy trying to keep his new pets alive and staring at them, to do research.

Then tragedy struck this morning. With his shoulders hanging and his head on his chest, he said: “My one spider is dead and the other one is barely alive.”

Now I could not ignore it anymore. “What happened, can we do some resuscitation?” Needless to say, this joke did not go down so well. I rushed to the spider house – my fear for ugly insects and goggas forgotten.

There it was, the unidentified spider lying on his back covered with ants. The rain spider seemed to have crawled into a corner – he looked sad, ready to give up and die… I wondered out loud…

“How could an ant kill a mighty spider?”

“Mommy, there’s power in numbers,” he said.

- Cathy Dlodlo

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