About half an hour ago, I was startled out of the story I was reading by a black, eight-legged thing rapidly falling to hang right above the keyboard of my laptop. In the split second between when it came into my field of vision and when it's fall halted, my brain registered, "Giant spider!" and a shriek burst out of me. In one smooth movement, I slid my compute (still open and displaying a chapter of story) forwards off of my lap, and scooted myself backwards, away from the spider. 

Now, I'm normally not particularly bothered by spiders when they aren't directly in my personal space, so once I had moved, I took a moment to look at the thing in front of me. 

It wasn't a spider. It was a daddy long legs, which is an arachnid in a separate grouping from spiders. (There is a type of spider called the daddy long legs spider, which causes some confusion, but the daddy long legs in question is not a spider.) 

I have this memory of the first time I saw one, back when I was younger and still got scared by spiders. My mom explained to me that it wasn't actually a spider, and pointed out a couple of differences between it and the spiders I had seen in the past. 

Daddy long legs, or at least the ones in my area, have, as the name suggests, very long legs. These legs, in proportion to the body, are probably about three to four times the length of the legs on most spiders. They are also very thin and spindly, to the point where, looking at a daddy long legs, I sometimes wonder how they keep them from snapping, even though at the same time they somehow seem more solid than most objects. The legs are admittedly thicker than a thin thread, but they aren't anywhere near as thick as a thick thread or a thin cord. The positioning of the legs on a daddy long legs also distinguishes them from spiders, with several very distinctive bends in them, but it's hard to explain. The body of a daddy long legs is very slight, almost as spindly as the legs. 

For whatever reason, I have a strange fondness for daddy long legs, and didn't mind them even before I started getting over my fear of spiders. 

This particular daddy long legs was still hovering where it had fallen, hanging on a thread of web fiber so thin it was invisible, and I had a bit of a staring contest with it. What I mean by that is that if you look at most spiders or daddy long legs, they will freeze up, so I carefully kept looking at it as I glanced around me to find something to move it with. I finally settled on a small, white box lid, after finding that the only convenient piece of paper was a drawing. I grabbed the lid and held it up to the daddy long legs, which tentatively extended a front leg and stepped onto the lid. If I had to describe how it did this, I would probably say "cutely," as the careful way it transferred its minuscule weight to the surface and the delicacy with which it placed that first leg were indeed quite adorable, even if it was an eight-legged creepy-crawly. 

I intended to take the daddy long legs out of my room, but as I started moving towards the door, it decided to hop off of the lid. 

Now that it wasn't dangling in the middle of the room, I was fine with letting it do whatever it wanted, so I let it be and did something else for a while. 

As I started writing this, I saw it picking its way towards my dresser. It's actually quite an accomplishment that it managed to get to that area without going though where I was, and I smiled as I saw it carefully step from one book to the next. 

The biggest difference, for me, between spiders and daddy long legs is that I don't like spiders, even if I don't always mind them. But daddy long legs seem almost like small children, to me. They have a slight aura of intelligence that I can't entirely explain. It's probably just me being weird and imagining things, but it gives them a special place in my heart nonetheless.