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…

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