The Passenger.
There was an unexpected passenger in the car. I know a thing or two about spiders and even I was surprised to see the large orb web spun over the passenger seat, not to mention the large Aranea cavatica in the middle of the web, and if you know anything about spiders you know that’s the same species that was the hero of a famous children’s book. Some people think the pig is the hero of the book but let’s be clear: there’s a reason it’s called Charlotte’s Web and not Wilbur’s Mudhole.
I gently coaxed the spider out with a stick and she was easygoing about it, maybe realizing a car isn’t the best place for a spider, although inside is better than outside. Sometimes, when I’ve been in the passenger seat myself, I’ve looked over at the rearview mirror and seen a spider clinging to it only to fly away after a few minutes. And if you’re thinking spiders don’t fly, well, sometimes they do when they’re young and they use their silk to catch the wind so it carries them upward, and most also fly when the car they’re hanging onto reaches highway speeds.
The one mistake I made was telling my wife there’d been a spider in the car. She was upset that there’d been a spider in the car, and that that I’d put Charlotte among the flower pots and not out in the yard, well away from the house and anywhere she—my wife—might want to go. She—my wife—would even have preferred that I kill her—the spider. And I feel like I’ve failed. We’ve been married almost thirty years now. We have an anniversary coming up in a few days, in fact, and yet she still doesn’t appreciate that I know a thing or two about spiders. When we see a spider in the house she doesn’t care that I can accurately identify it as, in most cases, a wolf spider which, if you know anything about spiders, you know is a member of the Lycosa family—a group that’s completely harmless to humans, doesn’t build webs, and, let’s face it, isn’t nearly as bad as whatever pests it’s eating. Having a spider in the house is like having a guard dog that doesn’t need walking, lets itself in and out, and catches vermin. In other words it’s like having a guard dog that’s a cat. A very small cat that just happens to have eight legs and eight eyes.
And this is where I admit that she has good reason for being suspicious of my association with spiders. Back when we were first married, when the ink on the license wasn’t even dry, we were out on the back patio and I caught a small member of the Salticidae family and went to show it to my wife. If you know anything about spiders you know this family is very cute, with fluffy bodies and lovely iridescent green and purple markings and big round eyes. They’re completely harmless to humans and they’re almost friendly. There’s even a trend of people finding these spiders in their homes—the people’s homes, not the spiders’—and building little terrariums and making them pets. It’s like keeping a hamster. A very small hamster that just happens to have eight legs and eight eyes, and that might, when it dies, leave behind an egg sac with a hundred or more babies inside, but if you know anything about spiders you know most of them will eat each other.
And if you know anything about spiders you also know members of the Salticidae family are commonly called “jumping spiders”.
This one jumped down her shirt.
She didn’t divorce me on the spot so there’s that but she hasn’t exactly let go of it either, even after all these years. I understand she was upset, but I was upset too. The spider died! And I was at least partly responsible! But it’s never happened again. I’ve done my best to keep spiders away from her, both for her benefit and theirs. At some point, surely, the incident will be, if not forgotten, then at least forgiven. There’s got to be a statute of limitations on something like this. Anyone who knows anything about spiders, would you please let me know what it is?
One morning earlier this week I found a cicada on the patio. It wasn’t one of the annual cicadas which are big, dark green, and have dark eyes. They have bulbous thoraxes and heads that, even for bugs, seem weird, like they’ve been produced in some kind of bubble machine. This one was small, solid black, more streamlined, and it had red eyes. The thirteen-year cicadas are back, or at least some are back. The big cluster isn’t supposed to come out until next year—somewhere I still have a t-shirt that a friend of mine made with a picture of a cicada and “Thirteen Year Reunion-2011”. I hope he’ll do another one next year.
The good news, that I hope didn’t come too late for that one cicada, is since then I’ve found the shells of others, and I even heard one in a tree this morning, ratcheting up its mating song, so it seems like we’re getting a preview of what in a year’s time should be a grand performance. Since the thirteen-year cicadas are smaller than their annual cousins they’re slightly quieter, but what they lack in quality they make up for in quantity.
April 2022-Things got off to a rocky start when someone said, “Hey, remember pet rocks?” This sent everyone off into a research project that uncovered, among other things, the fact that there was an official “Pet Rock” invented by an advertising executive and sold in a cardboard box with ventilation holes in 1975. Most staff old enough to remember the fad thought pet rocks were just rocks that people found and gave to each other as a joke in the mid-‘70’s. The fad was briefly revived by the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. A discussion of whether or not pet rocks should have googly eyes attached quickly degenerated into everyone sticking googly eyes on everything.
For about a couple of months now I’ve been seeing a strange magenta light at the back of the yard. They seem like they could be leftover holiday lights that someone hasn’t bothered to take down but I only started seeing them after the new year. There used to be a lot of trees beyond our back fence and, beyond that, a house about the same size as ours that I could hardly see. In the winter when the trees were bare and the weeds dry and dead there’d be a faint glimmer of yellow lights, but that was all. Then someone bought that house, cut down most of the trees and bulldozed the house. They replaced it with a big white McMansion that, as far as I know, is still empty. Maybe the construction isn’t finished. Maybe it’s overpriced. Maybe both. All I really know is that at night it’s dark. I thought that strange magenta light must be shining through from the other side of the street the McMansion faces.
At the end of every year I stop and reflect on how we define a year. On Earth it takes us a little over three-hundred and sixty-five days to make a complete orbit of the Sun, but our planet is in constant motion, so the decision to mark the year’s end in the middle of winter seemed to me, when I was young, strangely arbitrary. And in fact many cultures celebrate the “new year” at different times—in most cases because the lunar calendar is at least as widely used as the solar calendar.
