Spider Summer

It is the summer of the spiders. This golden orb weaver, as big as your fist, tidies up her double web every night. This particular spider lives under the roof overhang of my studio. This is a tropical spider and this is the northernmost habitat for her. Her friends inhabit the eaves of every place on the ranch. In the light of early morning her web glows in a golden haze. The strands are so strong I have read that they can be used for fishing nets. Sometimes I tentatively pull on a strand, marvelling at the strength of it, stronger than the threads I use in my sewing. We have a communality, these spiders and I. They are far better than I in their fabric weaving and so I watch them, humbled by their confident expertise.

And then there are the zipper spiders, almost as large. They make a brilliant zipper stitch in the middle of their webs. Zipper spiders almost always have a male spider hanging out in the perifery of their webs. Sooner or later the females eat them!

Inside my studio there are small house spiders. They make night webs from the computer printer to the windowsill, across the screen doors, under the sewing machine. Mostly, I gently sweep them away and I know they will again set up housekeeping overnight.

Occasionally, a bad spider will appear. Today, my friend Bruce was working in my studio installing a timer on the water heater. Bruce is embedded in the natural world and knows a lot about these things. He looks at a rather smallish spider with an egg sac, everything stuck to the side of a door. "This is a brown recluse spider," he says. He shows me the identifying markings on the abdomen. No one wants to be bitten by such a spider: you don't die, but the bite can be pretty bad. We get paper towels and remove the spider to the outdoors.

It is the summer of the spiders and it is so hot and humid we could die of it. But still, we go to bed without air conditioning and sleep well in total heavy darkness, hearing the owls calling, tree frogs chirping, katydids sawing their leggy music, and everything segues to the gradual dawn chorus of birds to awaken us. I am not truly an urban person. I hate sleeping in the summer city, hermetically sealed in the air conditioned pristine atmosphere where we hear the sirens and the traffic and see the lights of the city through the shades and curtains.

Very few of our friends get it about why we love it here. And that's O.K. I told a friend that I had seen a bobcat in the driveway. I thought that this was a notable and wonderful event. I stopped for a few minutes to watch this cat slowly meandering from one side of the lane to the other. It was just past dawn and this cat looked quite dark. It moved with that feline grace and I could see the curled up short tail. I had seen cat skat on the bridge and just before I saw the bobcat I smelled cat. I wished I had my camera with me. My friend responded that this must have been a scary event. No, just amazing, an affirmation to me that our place is a wildlife traffic corridor.

Spider summer, full of surprises and respect for the natural world. Soon it will be vegetable planting time!