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
7/16/2021
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.
4/25/2020
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.
9/13/2017
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.
2/17/2017
Bright sun, deep blue sky. A Canada goose flying over the mountain all by itself honks anyway. A small spider runs across my coat.
9/5/2016
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.
8/28/2016
A warm morning, and all I hear are the birds of winter: chickadee, nuthatch, pileated woodpecker. A dead cranefly dangles from a spiderweb.
3/25/2016
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.
9/25/2015
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.
9/8/2015
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.
4/6/2015
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.
9/27/2014
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.
9/17/2014
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.
9/11/2014
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.