A storm at dawn has left everything sodden. A small pale spider dangles half-way between the eaves and the banister, slowly turning, occasionally waving her legs.
spiders
Thin clouds at sunrise. I squint at a piece of cattail down floating below the balustrade and it turns into the skinniest white spider I’ve seen, ascending an invisible thread.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Bright sun, deep blue sky. A Canada goose flying over the mountain all by itself honks anyway. A small spider runs across my coat.
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.
A warm morning, and all I hear are the birds of winter: chickadee, nuthatch, pileated woodpecker. A dead cranefly dangles from a spiderweb.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.