“Spiders evidently as surprised by the weather as the rest of us: their
webs were still everywhere - little silken laundry lines with perfect
snowflakes hung out in rows to dry.”
- Leslie Land, The 3000-Mile
Garden
“There are spiders living comfortably in my house while the wind howls
outside. They aren't bothering anybody. If I were a fly, I'd have second
thoughts, but I'm not, so I don't.”
- Richard Brautigan, The
Tokyo-Montana Express
My place is a place of
hundreds of spiders in the fall. The fall is mating season and, in an effort to
expand their territory, webs and their resident spider inhabitants abound in
spaces common and uncommon – trees, bushes, corners, walls, crannies, chinks,
and crevasses. Their webs are organic feats of astonishment. It is a rare
morning that I can move from the front door to the driveway without becoming
draped in spider webs – the fibres sticky in my hair, my face enswathed in
fine, tickling filaments. I stand in either reverence or consternation.
The spiders hang in
pugilistic splendor in the middle of the webs, staring me down with a nervy
confidence, sometimes running at me up a long line of silk like a dog at a
stranger in the yard. She exhibits a
bantam fearlessness, a dauntless valor.
I never mean to harm them,
though I am not above a bit of teasing. I will sometimes give the web a slight
tab, sending the fractious arachnid off in an indignant stomp to the middle of
the web, where it sits and glowers, its legs curled up under it. It is not afraid of me. More offended and
outraged.
My favourites are the
cat-faced spiders. Their bodies look
like the faces of cats, complete with pointed ears, eyes, and whiskers. They
are quite large, and totally harmless. Another is the Daddy-Long-Legs spider. I
love how his bulbous body hangs from his legs like a hammock. His incongruous
body is like the bizarreness of a tortoise – ludicrous but graceful, peculiar
but poignant.
The spiders will not be in
my place long – once the eggs are laid, they will die. Their webs will gather
dust and debris over the course of the winter and, in the spring, the egg sacs
will explode. Tiny, Lilliputian spiders will mob down the indestructible silk
tracings created by their mothers and they will troop out to the garden to
begin their own predator lives in their macro spider world.
But, for now, they are very
much in my world and in my place. We
share a diffident respect.
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