I wrote a second email response, too:

Thank you again for writing to me.

It's peculiar how "scared" - maybe apprehensive is a better word - I feel about coming back. I don't feel this apprehensive about spiders, even the black widows that appear to live at the front of my house.

I think, now that I've introduced the idea of the spiders, that I feel pretty confident that the black widows are living their lives with no malicious thoughts directed at me. I'm pretty sure they aren't planning to stalk me or anything... so I don't feel threatened by them.

I had a tiny black widow living below the window above my kitchen sink at my condo. It was tiny, so it wasn't scary, and I was impressed with the number of ants it got. I didn't "have" ants, so I wondered if the reason was the black widow.

It would always run and hide when I turned on the water.

But then it was getting quite a lot bigger, so I was thinking I didn't want to accidentally bash its web and get bitten, so I wiped the web away, thinking the little spider would move outside.

It moved to my stove top. I didn't cook very many things at once, so I almost never turned on the burner where it had decided to build its new web.

But, still...

So, I decided I'd better take it outside. I thought about that for awhile, sort of picturing it in my mind... I sometimes think that very clear mental images have a way of being "seen" by others who are receptive, even insects.

When I went to the stove to take it outside, the spider went behind the control knob, which I knew came off. I hoped it would stay behind the knob, on the knob, and that I could take it outside to the back by the fence way at the back. Sure enough... it stayed right on the knob, and I kept talking to it.

I remember that I passed the condo director who was so instrumental in me losing my condo because the association refused to pay their share of the privy pit remediation, and I hoped he wouldn't kill the spider, so I stopped talking to the spider, so as not to alert him.

The condo association director was certainly much MUCH more dangerous than the black widow.

Though until this moment, I had never really thought about it like this, in terms of an actual comparison.

Thank you again for writing. I think I may post this story ... to start.

(I posted this first, but then I edited so that the two emails would be in chronological order.)