Spider-sense

The Weaver
(by R.P.Edwards)

Carefully, with silken strides
She weaves the needful place
Beauty formed
And deadly done
A graceful, grasping space
But when, perchance
While seeking life
An impostor then is found
She wastes no time
In sharing rhyme
She casts it to the ground!

It’s an American tradition. A bedrock sort of thing. Sunday afternoon, July, a gentle breeze, birds in the trees and…sizzling on the grill…hamburgers and hot dogs. True, earlier in the day, in our post-church wandering of the grocery store aisles, we bandied about the age-old question, “What do you want for dinner?” This, of course, led to categories, and sub-categories, and ultimately led us to ground-chuck, and the lowly hot dog. But now, all the difficult decisions of the day having been made, I focused on the task at hand.

After a few minutes; after the first flip; while the burgers simmered on the cooling rack above and the hot dogs, below, became…hot, my youngest son…sensing the shrinking window of opportunity…came outside to share a man-moment with dad. And, after passing (temporarily) the flat and squarish baton, I had him remove the tasty disks to a waiting cookie sheet and, midst the motions, I pointed out…the web.

There, hanging beneath a neighbor's second-story screened in porch, clinging to the horizontal support timber above and reaching diagonally to the vertical post to the left, a spider (some sort of orb-weaver I suppose, my father would know) had constructed a beautiful trap. As I pointed out this elaborate fly-catcher to my man-child, I remembered (and related) times past when I would tease these industrious eight-leggers by tossing into their net some tiny, lifeless matter. The spider, upon investigation, would quickly toss the “imposter” out of the web. She apparently had no time for that which did not add to her life.

And so…I was thinkin’. This little bug (I know, “arthropod”) is smarter than we. For, when we find that which is dead and lifeless invading our collective “webs,” we often tolerate the space-takers until our life-necessity is cluttered and clunky. Perhaps we should follow the lead of that little weaver.

(alright, here’s an addendum. I’m talking, mainly, of “non-human stuff”…not your spouse. If he or she is still wiggling…give ‘em a chance.)