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Day’?s Verse:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
2 Cor. 5:17
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The Westborough train station harbors more spiders than any normal metal structure. Everywhere you look, spider webs drape from corner to corner, edge to edge, railing to railing, over nearly every surface. Let me interject that the Westborough commuter rail stop has more than its fair share of perfect-for-spider spots. It’?s essentially a huge stairway and ramp system to a walkway over the tracks, and the stairs and ramp on both sides of the tracks are made up of I-beams, thinner steel railings, handrails, and the sides are covered with a sort of wide metal mesh that keeps people from jumping onto the tracks below. The covered part of the platforms are simple metal roofs, but a netting keeps birds from nesting under there — and, incidentally, protects the largest, juiciest spiders from their main predators. In short, it’?s a metal framework almost custom-designed to facilitate a rapid increase in the spider population.

The arachnids themselves range from microscopic spiders the size of a period to spiders as big as a quarter or larger (thank goodness, those big ones tend to stay high above, out of the way). Abandoned webs catch all sorts of detritus from the air all around, giving the entire station an abandoned, unloved, dirty feeling. I put my arm on a railing, felt a light touch, and there was a spider crawling up my arm. I glance at my bike, and webs stretch from it to the wall. Every visit, my skin crawls with the imagined sensation of eight-legged creatures crawling onto me.

Thinking about it, I don’?t really think there’?s anything that awful about spiders, even if they got in my hair (which would be about as bad as I can imagine it). A spider could bite, but honestly I don’?t think there are any poisonous ones here. It’?s just the creepiness factor of spending hours surrounded by inhabited and abandoned spider webs starts getting to me after a while.

Speaking of creepiness, riding home last night I felt a bit of grit or something fly into my eye. I rubbed the eye a bit and let it go, but when I got home it still irritated me. Looking in the mirror, I saw a small speck, maybe half the size of a pin-head (maybe a little larger than that; it looked huge in my eye. Much bigger than stuff you normally find in your eyes). I pulled it out, and it was a beetle. A very tiny black beetle. In my eye. Ick.