I am sure that my first memory is planted by others– I can’t possibly remember something from such a young age.
But when I was still in the crib, a spider descended on a thin strand of web into my crib and bit my face. It terrified my other when she found me in the morning.
The doctor said I’d scar for sure, and that without medication to counteract the poison I’d have died in a matter of hours.
Most of my life I was terrified if spiders. That’s only changed in the last six years or so, as I’ve had to be a grown up and deal with sometimes frightening looking little arachnids. Once, during my undergraduate years, Mom hit a really big, round spider with her shoe. It exploded– thousands of tiny baby spiders running everywhere.
The Cherokee origin story has a water spider. I often say, to diffuse tensions, that I believe a spider brought fire across the water to start the world when in religious arguments. It seems ridiculous, I suppose, but no moreso than any other myth.
The big thing that ties into all this from my childhood is Spider-Man. I never really thought it was because of his origin, but maybe that was the link for me all along. Maybe I wanted to be like Spider-Man so I could not fear spiders but instead revel in the power of their bite?
At any rate, that’s my earliest memory, I think, though the actual memory is of being told the story and not of the actual event. Sometimes I think I remember watching it, feeling the tickle of the legs on my face, the sting of the bite.
But there’s no way.