From the Boston Globe:
«Waite was feeding red seedless grapes to her 1 1/2-year-old daughter this weekend when her father stopped her cold. A black widow spider, the most dangerous type of spider in the United States, was nestled in the bunch of fruit.
...
Waite, of Boylston, purchased the California grapes last week at a Shaw's supermarket in Shrewsbury. She said she wanted to get the word out to ensure that others would be cautious with their grapes.»
Boylston, Massachusetts is a very small town south of the ineffably beautiful Wachusett Reservoir and east of the less comely metropolis of Worcester. My family is from this very small, Lovecraftian town (I can't read The Dunwich Horror without imagining it taking place in Boylston). Even more than Arlington, this town's central square easily evokes images of the American Revolution (I was there for the bicentennial in 1976). It is a place where the trees still outnumber the people, the word "farm" isn't automatically associated with "server," and "rendering" has a not at all digitial connotation.
My brother Archie and his wife currently live in Berlin (Maplewood Farm), adjacent to Boylston. I was ten years old when my parents moved us to Cape Cod. For me, this town will always be a place stuck in the late seventies (not in a hip way, either). A simple place for simplier times.
And then the black widow spiders came...
Re:gads, why is this news?
jjohn on 2003-11-26T23:04:55
I think it's the "black widow" angle that caught my eye. I didn't run into those kinds of spiders much when I was a kid. I now know that I was in prime brown recluse territory though. Yikes!Re:gads, why is this news?
hfb on 2003-11-26T23:15:34
Missouri is prime territory for giant wolf spiders which are just grey furry versions of tarantulas. I was moving a palatte of bricks one summer for my dad and I got to the last row next to the house and up pops a wolf spider the size of a large man's hand. I nearly wet myself and, even as the chubette I was, flew over the fence and locked myself in the house just in case it tried to come in via the front door:) Daddy didn't believe me until he sprayed pesticide behind the bricks and found the corpse. Even he was a bit scared I think. That didn't make the news...geez, now I feel shunned by the news media. Spiders like fruit...remember to submerge grapes in water and wash them after you buy them. :)
