A Motivational Spider

Spiders seem to be appearing in my life a lot lately. Not those meek little measly-spindly house-dwelling ones, the kind you see Garfield smacking with a rolled-up newspaper in the Sunday funnies. I mean those giant garden-variety spiders that spin big, gorgeous orb webs wherever they find a place to hang their hat. They've been in my yard, they've been in Delaware--the other day I caught a collection of students staring one down on my campus, coffee cups forgotten in their hands, completely awed. Maybe there's been an insect surge on the East Coast, and these guys have decided to drape their webs out and try their luck. (Or maybe they got wind of the reboot of the Spider-Man franchise.)

Wandering into the living room today to do nothing in particular, I happened to glance at a window, and I saw this orb web coming out at me like an air-bag. It nearly touched the glass, then slacked back as the wind died down. In the dead center, curled up tight as a nut, was a spider, and not a small one.

This fellow decided to spin his web right outside a window--a window, I need not add, that any one of us could crank open at any moment. It's not an up-and-down window, it's a window that opens out. That takes guts, I guess. He risked demolition for a pretty view. Either that, or he just doesn't know.

At any rate, that window's the least of his problems. It's the first truly blustery day of the season, and he happens to have placed himself right at the crux of the storm. Every time the merest breeze goes barreling by, that web of his bops around like one of those cheap old screensaver graphics, and every time it happens you're positive it's going to detatch. But when it calms, there he is in the center, utterly motionless, pretending that nothing happened. I think he's got a spidery stoic-philosopher thing going on.

Other spiders sprawl around in their kingly webs like Emma Lazarus's take on the Colossus, with conquering limbs astride from strand to strand. Not this guy. He can't afford to sprawl. He remains huddled against the cold, cringing in the way spiders do, looking like one of the test subjects for Mad-Eye Moody's Cruciatus Curse. It's all the odder because he's one of those spiders with a vacant smiley face etched on their inner abdomen, so all the while his top half buries his head in his hands, his bottom half looks on the verge of throwing me a merry wink.

One time a pine needle landed among the strands somewhere near the edge. The spider felt it and eagerly trapezed his way over, convinced that it was his dinner. When he got to it, he fished it out, examined it tremulously with his front legs, and finally threw it away with the same air of disgust a writer has as he flings his fourth crumpled paper across the room. Then he went back to the center of the web, to wait.

I wanted a photo of that beautiful web of his, so I went looking for my phone. (By the way, none of the photos I did get were any good. Glare too bright.) When I came back the wind had punched a hole in it and turned it from an orb into a work of modern-industrial art. And there sat Spider among the wreckage, looking subtly, stoically sarcastic, as if to say, why me?

But after a moment of this, he stretched his legs and went climbing out to the pieces where the thread had frayed, connecting a bit here, eating a bit there, until it looked--well, it didn't look the way it had before, but at least it looked like something that was serving its purpose. And he crawled back to the place that used to be the center to wait.

I like this guy. There's something valiant about him. He's brave in the old-fashioned sense of putting forth a good face. I dread the day that someone opens that window and sends his web floating into the atmosphere.

Though, knowing him, he'll probably just tack it to the nearest tree and keep on waiting.