Caught In Charlotte’s Web
It is still too dark to check on her.
Last night, I watched helplessly as she rushed to bundle up her home in the failing light, as rain lashed down and the wind blew. She hadn’t quite succeeded by the time I closed the blinds, but she was huddled up in a relatively safe and protected spot.
As dawn finally breaks over the eastern ridge, I hazard a peek through the blinds. Her home is immaculate, and she is perched comfortably in the center, her head down and waiting. I see the beginning haze of a cloud of gnats rising from the stinking laurel shrub below, and I am relieved that she will not go hungry today.
I call her Charlotte, for the obvious reason that she is an orb weaver spider, and I was one of the many children in this world who cried over E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Her home is a web that she has spun across the outside of my dining room window, mere feet from where I sit and write most days.
Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is aptly named “spider season” by the locals.
Jenny Wren 