By Jean Ponzi
Spider Ma’am
I’ve heard you’re never more than three feet from a spider, anywhere on Earth. Shoutout to the life force of spiders, whose adaptive persistence stars in the drama Web of Life.
One spring a spider spun up housekeeping around my kitchen window. This diligent arthropod cobwebbed together the stems of my rosemary plant, salt and pepper shakers and the pair of ruby-hued goblets where I root philodendron cuttings. Leaves, branches, glass, metal – all held the hammock she crafted to host fellow insects for lunch.
But she didn’t hang out in the web. She lodged in the china potato that holds our fresh garlic.
This spider was big, striped brown and so busy. When her web got bedraggled, I vacuumed it up and she re-wove it, overnight. We repeated this cycle of vacuum/rebuild a few times as the seasons progressed.
In that era, I loved Nature stuff but had not yet learned much genuine eco-logic. Like how we humans are only part (not rulers) of Mutual realities. I believed Jean kept Spider’s web-world tidy and she debugged my kitchen. Who starred in whose story?
When family planned to visit for Thanksgiving, I started to worry about the spider in relation to my relatives. Their house is always perfectly clean, with swagged window treatments, white carpeting and leather sofas. A troubling contrast formed in my mind between their pristine human-ideal environment and the eclectic festoons of my diversely inhabited Nature Haven.
To put our best foot and pedipalp forward, I cleaned the windowsill one more time. Spider retreated deep in the potato.
Alarmed and ashamed of my vacuous reaction, I climbed on a chair to peer under the potato’s rim. I could barely see a thin brown line angling out from the shadowed ceramic wall. She was still there. And she persisted.
Through that holiday weekend, Spider worked on a new web. To their credit, my kinfolk were fascinated by my silk-swathed window and its striped, elusive inhabitant. They admired at a distance.
But I had sucked up her livelihood once too often. We’d had first frost, and no new snacks came crawling. Spider starvation would be my fault.
I searched other windowsills for flies and dropped them into the empty web, though I doubted the food value and appeal of dried-up Dipteran stiffs. When hibernating ladybugs lost their grip on the bedroom ceiling, a giant Spider Waitress served them promptly, in a uniform resembling a bathrobe.
Ice rimmed the window and small holes ripped in the web. Dust motes gathered on its sloping threads, twinkling in low morning sun like microscopic snow drifts. Shriveled rosemary leaves dangled from its ragged threads, but I did not touch that web.
I also didn’t see Spider, except once, when she skittered out of reach as I pulled a clove of garlic off the bulb in her potato.
Was she hibernating? I read that some spiders do. Was she dead? I learned that some arachnids can live for years, in hospitable environments. Could I curb my human nature and really be her kind of home?
Days grew longer. Through the scraggly spider web new shoots sprouted, tenderly gray-green, along the old rosemary stems. Outside, white sheets puddled into rich brown mud.
One morning I stopped pouring coffee when a motion caught my eye, high up on the kitchen window. Two small brown striped spiders skittered up the sash. One stepped off into the air, sailing toward a ruby goblet on its strand of building silk.
Jean Ponzi is a longtime local voice for Earth and columnist for The Healthy Planet since 1997.