And now comes the time of year when the spiders of the neighborhood build web, huge webs. We always seem to get a couple around our deck and screened-in porch; for three years running a spider built an amazing web between the porch and the rose bushes. Last night I noticed a spider shuttling back-and-forth like a bead upon an abacus (you remember those, right?) in a web that grew as I watched; stretching from the gutters to the ground and attached to the downspout, a distance of more than ten feet.
Walking around our usual route this morning, Miss Mocha and I saw many webs—running between a cable wire and a house, between a stop sign and a fence, from various trees to the ground, all bedecked with dew and looking like jewels in the misty morning light.
These structures are at best ephemeral, a stiff breeze will knock them down, or a running deer (of which we have more than a surplus), or a bad storm. Hurricane Sandy knocked out the web between the porch and the rose bush last year and that spider (or rather, the descendants thereof) have not returned this year. Maybe we'll have a quiet fall and the spiders will thrive.
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