by William Cobbs

Created on: May 31, 2009

When a little boy, my greatest fear was SPIDERS...any kind of spider! I was undaunted by bears, bobcats, horses, cows, pigs,chickens, snakes, or any other denizens of the woods, but SPIDERS really worried me.

It might have been because of a small spider bite by a brown spider when three years old. At any rate, I desperately looked at the phylum arachnida with great fear and especially the black ones with the red spot that ate their husbands.

But all of those fearful spiders were SMALL!

This is a story of BIG spiders.

Eventually, I reached a great age and was married to my wife Rita, and we decided to try the wilds of Texas as a new home. Our job there was to teach teachers how to teach reading, and was very successful. It meant that we would travel over the entire 100 counties of Texas, and so were able to net the flora and fauna of the state, which always claimed that Texas had the biggest of everything.

Well, we first lived near Austin and bought a large bunch of bananas from an itinerant Mexican vendor,

Back at our home, I started pulling the bananas apart, when a huge TARANTULA leapt out and confronted me and my wife. NOT a spider but a tarantula! It lept to the window and disappeared into the outside woods.

But it was not a spider though large and hairy.

We bought a remote log cabin on 35 acres at a ridiculous low price and had to drive through a state park and power right of way to find our cabin. There we had a pet timber wolf, a pet armadillo, a pet dog and a pet cat, of course.

But our mail had to be picked up in a nearby tiny historic town called BASTROP, named after a 16th century Count Bastrop who had "discovered' the area( the Mexicans had been there for a thousand years and didn't need to be discovered). Bastrop was a beauiful small place with two or three streets and a large brick post-office, the center of interest of the town. There was even a small newspaper which had an interesting columnist.

But everyone met at the large brick building that was the postoffice.

OUR first trip there to establish our box number and become citizens of Bastrop had us park our car behind the postoffice and walk on a cement walk by the side of the brick building that led to the front entrance.

The first thing we noticed as we passed the building was a gigantic web of great ropy white cords which covered the entire side of the structure, What in the world could have made such a huge trap? The web was about sixteen

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