Saturday, September 4, 2010

Spider Season


There's a William Shatner movie from the seventies in which a town is overrun with spiders. In typically bleak seventies style, the heroes lose: the haunting last shot of the movie is an overhead of the small town completely blanketed by the snow-white webs of the freakish arachnids.

Portland at this time of year is like the first reel of that movie. Spiders and their horrible webs are everywhere.

Yep, we're experiencing Spider Weather.

Set a glass of water down on the picnic table, and next time you pick it up for a sip there's a strand of webbing across the mouth of the glass. Set your bike against the fence and two minutes later it's a vital structural support for a bug-catching web.

Every single day I blunder through at least two webs, often ending up with a recently evicted and none too happy eight legged freak in my hair, or rampaging across the lenses of my glasses. Yesterday, my flailing reaction to this ocular horror sent spectacles and spider sailing from my head. Luckily, both found a soft landing on the welcome mat and the glasses didn't break.

As summer transitions to fall, nature will resolve the issue as it always does, sending the spiders back to wherever they go when it's too rainy to spin a nine foot web across my back yard.

I hope.
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1 comment:

Sharon Larrison said...

Though not usually do I write, this spider piece was captivating for keen attention.

 
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