A few degrees above freezing. In the half dark I can just make out a spider descending from the rafters into my lap. Where is she off to, I wonder, so late in the year?
spiders
July 16, 2021
The sun catches a tiny, white spider ballooning past the porch on a long strand of silk. It touches down in the bergamot, among bumblebees.
April 25, 2020
Insects are flying and so are the gnatcatchers. I notice a strand of silk waving from the eaves with a tiny, pale spider at the end of it.
September 13, 2017
Beads of rain reveal an orb-weaver’s web hung impossibly high above the garden, its maker like one darker drop with her legs tucked in.
February 17, 2017
Bright sun, deep blue sky. A Canada goose flying over the mountain all by itself honks anyway. A small spider runs across my coat.
September 5, 2016
Clear and cool. The orb-weaving spider whose web spans the end of the porch hides against the house with only her gray underside showing.
August 28, 2016
A warm morning, and all I hear are the birds of winter: chickadee, nuthatch, pileated woodpecker. A dead cranefly dangles from a spiderweb.
March 25, 2016
One wood frog still calls in the marshy corner of the field, late for the orgy. Under the porch railing, the first, tiny spiders of spring.
September 25, 2015
Breezy and cool. The spider with the banded legs at the end of the porch clutches the husk of a stinkbug, rotating it, looking for morsels.
September 8, 2015
A fat spider on a web in the eaves retracts her banded legs, making herself as small as possible when I approach. The rooster’s rasping cry.
April 6, 2015
Clouds gather and, over the course of an hour, disappear again. A small red spider rappels down from my glasses onto the red porch floor.
September 27, 2014
A bold squirrel crosses the porch, going right under my chair. Below the top railing, an upside-down fly spins madly in a net of silk.
September 17, 2014
The stiltgrass stems are beginning to redden. In the shadows of the trees, funnel spider webs still sag with their night’s haul of dew.
September 11, 2014
I shift my boots on the railing, and the spider that had been keeping watch from its web retreats to the eaves and curls up like a fist.