10/25/26
On the north side of my house, from chives to chimney, no less than one hundred and fifty spiders spend every evening weaving webs. Of this multiples of eight-legged clutter, one particularly plump and colorful specimen garners my admiration each night while I take the dog out for a pee. It’s an eye level sort of spider, or thereabouts, unbothered under the porch light by the hinge of the screen door. Its web always swings from the glass and brass fixture to the vinyl siding to the soffit and back again…a scalene shape habitually and boldly outlined by nine o’clock…a routine. And by ten thirty, cross-contours zig-zag to the center where the spider waits for me to admire it and its latest masterpiece before I turn in. The patterns glimmer in the glow of my patio decorations, reminding me of a Navajo rug—exercises in symmetry and repetition. I initially admired these creations as a naturalist, an inadvertent fan due to bedtimes and my curiosity, but I soon began studying them like a devoted scientist. And now, weeks later, after examining a substantial body of work, every delicate silk tapestry gets my two cents as an art critic. The compositions are changing. I notice voids between trapezoidal shapes growing larger each time, making the complexities seem more complex, the breaks seemingly more purposeful, and the beauty undoubtedly more beautiful than the previous night’s rendition. The spider is getting better at making its webs. And when the dew and the wind unwind what was woven, sometime after I’ve woke but before I’ve cared to notice, the spider begins again. Tomorrow’s version will surely be its best, as will the next one after that and so on until there is no more spider. But in case you didn’t know already, the spider doesn’t care about any of this. It’s only hunting.
Sometimes I’m a spider, too. I’ve spun many webs, but I’m never practicing web-making. Rather, I just keep spinning and spinning because that’s what spiders do. The web I’m working on is all I care about until I start another web tomorrow. A tangled mess, with me in the middle, waiting for the dog to go pee.
-Wyatt LeGrand
