Archive for the ‘spider’ tag
Will You Walk Into My Parlor?
One day last week I walked out of the gloom inside my head and over to the neighborhood park to enjoy some unexpected sunshine. I took my camera for a perspective shift, and meandered along the usual path, snapping pictures here and there of whatever I came across that seemed interesting.
We’d had a lot of rain in the days that came before, so not too many people were venturing off of the sidewalk and into the soggy grass. Intrepid explorer that I am, I’d worn my old duct taped sneakers for just such an occasion. I cut across the park to check out a copse of trees that I’d taken pictures of a few weeks previously, to see what new shapes they might make now that they were bare and shivery in the cold autumn sunlight.
But it was only when my camera turned back toward where I’d come from that I made the most amazing discovery.
At first it just seemed like the strangest play of sunlight on the grass, just a very vivid and peculiar reflection.
I thought water was the most obvious culprit. But then I’d just walked through it and noticed that the ground wasn’t as gloppy as I’d expected. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed puddles up to my ankles. Drawing a bit closer, I could see it shimmering, almost pulsating. In fact it seemed so otherworldly that for a wild moment I even considered alien involvement, in that brief disconnect as my brain weighed the evidence, rejecting and connecting, before finally making the logical, if still boggling, conclusion.
It was spider webs.
Shimmied by the wind, draped like a net to cover the grassy areas of the park. Probably all of it, but just the stretch revealed by the sudden sunlight was at least twenty feet across. Like something magical, if you walked right up to it and looked down you’d have trouble seeing it, even if you were looking. It took the combination of sun and light breeze and angle and distance to reveal the spiders’ secrets, their revelry in the dark solitude of a stretch of autumn gray.
And even then most of us walked right by it and through it, thinking it nothing more than an unusually shiny reflection. If we noticed it at all.
