I was being observed by a hundred mes . . . and one little spider.

Yep. That's right.

He must have had quite an arduous trek across the wilderness of my hallway. Maybe he'd chosen the overhead route, navigating the pitted, gray-white surface of the ceiling tiles like a tiny lunar rover. Or maybe he'd swung through the air like a featherlight Tarzan, from one silken rope after another. Maybe he had gone by ground, dodging my footfalls as if they were apocalyptic meteors crashing down around him. Well, however he'd done it, he was back in my toilet—merely six hours later than usual, and looking neither peeved nor smug, just serenely contented to be home.

Did he know how much he was pushing his luck? All it would take was a well-aimed wad of toilet paper, and I could be rid of both spider and web for good, sure as if Clotho herself had snipped the strands. I pointed this out to the spider, but he did not seem especially troubled by my threat. Maybe he was an exceptionally enlightened spider. For all I knew, he could be the Dalai Lama of arachnids, resigned to a life of exile in my toilet.

"Are you?" I asked. "Should I be honored?" But he would neither deny nor confirm my suspicions of his holiness. He was the epitome of spiderly humility.

"Oh dear . . . you don't suppose other spiders will be making pilgrimages to you?" I said. But he declined to speculate. Admittedly, I was a bit worried at the thought of my home becoming a travel destination for thousands of soul-searching spiders. I could only hope that if any truly creepy characters showed up, like black widows or brown recluses or tarantulas, they could be inspired by "my" spider to renounce their violent ways. Especially if they intended to stay a while, and hang their hammocks in every acute and obtuse corner of my home sweet rhomboidal home.

Yes—I know that sounds frightening at first, like a scene from that old William Shatner movie, Kingdom of the Spiders. But I decided to think of it as having a little crew come in and redo my wallpaper, whether I wanted them to or not. Sort of like I'd won some kind of "home makeover" from TrailerHouseBeautiful or Better Mobile Homes and Gardens. Whatever. Let's say that one day this crew of little interior decorators might show up, take one look at my thank-you-note wallpaper, and say, "Ghastly! This won't do at all! It simply must go!" Then they'd cover all my Emily Post-it notes with a delicate pattern of webs. I'd have silk instead of sentences. It wouldn't be "me," but it would be art. "It's airy, yet ornate," the critics would say. If I had a cocktail party and invited the black-turtlenecked man from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he would be impressed. Thereafter I would be listed in "Who's Who," and deleted from "What's What?" and "Why, Why?"

"You don't think it's overly strange, me hanging all these notes on the walls?" I questioned the wise little spider-Lama. But just as he wouldn't comment on his holiness, with respect to my decorating choices and possible strangeness he also kept his opinions to himself.