Ian has a spider. My son-in-law doesn’t actually refer to her as a pet, but he spends a lot of time checking on her well-being and reporting her progress. She hasn’t bitten him. Yet. When I visited recently, the family was discussing names. The woodchuck who often visits their deck is named Winston. No such luck for the spider – she wasn’t christened before I left. I’ll just call her Ian’s spider.

Ian, my daughter Alix, and my grandchildren have been following the day-to-day activities of this arachnid. They have discovered the same lesson that I learned this summer: spiders are hard to get rid of.

Expunging one of them once they have built a nest is almost impossible. It’s like watching the movie “Groundhog Day.” They build the web; two or three days later you notice it and sweep it away. Two days after that? It’s back. Spiders have stick-to-it-iveness. Literally. The webs they build are sticky.

Ian is a very learned fellow. He explained to me that the spider forms her web from two different types of silk. Some of the strands are sticky, the better to entrap their lunch. Other strands are quite silky – slippery in fact – for quick ease of travel as they build and traverse the web.

On my front stoop, the wrought iron handrails turn a corner. Within the left corner, Samantha, my local little black spider, built a web – about six inches off the deck. It filled the corner and once, when I left it there for a week, it grew larger. And dense. And tall. Either I swept it down with a broom or with my hands. Sometimes I even remember to wear my garden gloves. I can personally attest that their webs are sticky.

One day, after removing the web for the fourth or fifth time, I washed my hands well, soaked a wet cloth with Mr. Clean and scrubbed down the black iron balustrades and bottom railing. “There you go, little Miss 8-legs. Try building on that.” I was smug. I wouldn’t have to confront that foggy gray mass every morning. Samantha’s new web was back in two days. She must work the night shift.

The same thing happened with our long row of arbor vitae trees. They form a tall, dense hedge that during late summer always erupts with spider webs between the branches. Dear Richard swept them all down before we had dinner guests. The following week I looked up from supper on the deck only to be greeted by a whole new neighborhood of grey webs, rebuilt by the spider platoon.

I do feel guilty. Now that I know more about them, I don’t want to destroy their well-built homes. But they remind me of dust bunnies that need to be swept out of the house.

The web at Alix and Ian’s house is humongous. It is improbably attached to the trim on their deck door and spans the space to the large black cover on their gas grill. When the grill cover comes off, the web is destroyed. It lays dangling from its anchor on the house. In her infinite wisdom and instinct, the spider somehow reattached her home to the cover the morning after the lamb chops were charred.

Their fascinating spider neighbor is not small. Dark brown with yellow spots, she’s about an inch and a half long, but she’s substantially wide… probably three times the size of my front stoop critter. I don’t know if it’s because she eats well or is full of hundreds of little spiders. Ian has confirmed that she sleeps safely under a piece of house siding.

Ewwww! I just Googled spider egg numbers. Yikes! They lay hundreds to thousands in one egg sac, depending on their breed. The common house spider, the one that probably walks across my hair at night, lays about 200 at a whack. Judging from the number of spider webs here this summer, Richard and I could be spirited away by Halloween.

Luckily, I have never been afraid of spiders. My mother worked hard to ensure that I would not have any irrational fears. “Spiders are good – they trap flies and mosquitoes, and they won’t hurt you.” She never mentioned that they sometimes bite. And the bites are itchy. But I don’t get chomped on very often. I’m just going to keep the faith that all the 8-legged critters that surrounded us this summer are friendly, non-poisonous types. Keep eating those ticks and gnats, little buddies.

Uh oh. I just realized that when it gets cold, they are not snowbirding to Daytona. They’re gonna move inside here. I’ll have to continue to be a home wrecker… indoors. Maybe it’s best not to give them names after all. Sorry, Samantha.

Marcy O’Brien can be reached at moby.32@hotmail.com