Dear Spidey

An ode to unexpected interlopers

She set up shop on my windowsill, one edge of her funnel-shaped web attached to the side of a white ceramic planter, one connected to the aluminum window pane, and the third edge connected to a cedar board that serves as the canvas for an art piece I was gifted last summer. A trifecta of monuments: planter-pane-board, and a swooping funnel-shaped net like a black hole between.

I discovered her late winter, when a fly had found its way into my house and I was dancing my usual marauding dance with the intruder, holding a sheet of paper to extend my arm, moving first one way then the other around the kitchen island, eventually herding it into my office. I shut the door behind me, triumphant, the first act of my performance complete. I had narrowed the fly’s range of exploration. It was just a matter of time before I could shoo it out the door or corner it against a window pane long enough to open the window and scare it out.

This was going to be a window escape. I could tell. It kept bonking itself against the pane on the side that doesn’t open. I used my paper to create a barrier against its movement in that direction. It bonked a couple more times in the direction of the sliding latch and then unexpectedly dropped a few inches, just outside a stretch of gauzy webbing that I hadn’t noticed till then. Quicker than I could quite even perceive, Spidey darted out, nabbed the fly’s vibrating body, and dragged it into the nest hole.

I was stunned (though not perhaps as stunned as the fly). This hadn’t been my intention. I was dancing with the fly so I could free it. To be a good citizen of the world. To be humble about my housedness and not presume that I had Godly rights to take life. I danced to enforce a boundary and give the fly the benefit of the doubt: surely it was unaware that its presence was a nuisance to me. And given its innocence in this matter, I wanted to provide the opportunity for it to find someplace it would be more welcome. It seemed the right thing to do.

“I suppose I achieved that goal,” I thought darkly, as I stared at the hole where the fly had disappeared. I stood very still, paper in hand, looking at the little web for a while. When nothing new occurred, I thought, “welp, that happened.”

When watching nature documentaries, I am always at the end of my seat, heart in hand, cheering for the prey. My heart races as if I was the gazelle. It sounds absurd, even to me, but my body doesn’t lie. And yet here I was, hounding a poor disoriented insect and herding it into a death trap. Yet weirdly, I was not sick with guilt. I actually had that feeling of reverence that shows up when nature suddenly interrupts my human-centered city life routine. I was thrown back on my heels, suddenly aware of my own organismic existence. I had been suddenly (if violently) reminded of my status as a simple player in the cycle of life. I had abetted the murder of an innocent fly, and contributed to the survival of an arachnid (who, I should add, was also an intruder, albeit one less irritating to me).

I befriended Spider. Nicknamed her“Spidey.” Shesat above my writing desk and when I was a little stuck on a sentence, I would sit up a little straighter and peer at her web, admire new renovations, see if I could catch a peek of her body or two little black eyes on stilts inside the funnel-like structure she had made for a home.

When I was tidying for the cleaning person, I rearranged some items on the windowsill but did so carefully, so as not to disturb the now truly mansion-size web my buddy had created. I peeked at Spidey and said hello. She was down the funnel, below the range of my sight. I imagined hollering down the web canyon and listening to my echo “HELLO, Hello, hello…hel…” It truly did not occur to me that anyone might find the web anything but magnificent.

I didn’t notice until this morning when, unexpectedly, there was a fly in my office. I thought to myself, “Oh, Spidey will get it.” And then I looked up to find the whole web gone. The only sign that it had ever existed was a few stray strands, thinner than human hair, stuck on a piece of paper art that had eventually been inducted into the housing structure.

At first I felt guilt. I hadn’t even thought to leave a post it note for the cleaner. Perhaps a brightly colored one with an arrow pointing to the web, saying “please do not disturb.” She might have thought me insane, but I know she would have left it. In my own defense, she hadn’t cleaned that windowsill in the past 3 months she had been here. Was this, I wondered, because Spidey’s nest had been less obvious or because I had provided more distracting messes these past few months?

In the end, all I can offer is my awareness that Zandra (my cleaning person) eventually completed the cycle of life, fulfilling her role as a predator by doing her job so that she can feed herself too.

I did write Spidey a small note, apologizing for not protecting her better, hoping that she escaped into the deep cracks in the window pane, promising to be more mindful should she (or her cousins) decide to return.

Again, this is a special kind of absurd. Silly human - what do I think - Spidey is going to crawl out of hiding (or back from the dead) and read it? Forgive me? And yet, in some cosmological compromise between the materialist’s ruthless perception of mother nature and the Disney version where Spidey and I are dueting BFFs sharing grooming tips, it felt… like a gesture. Like an acknowledgement that something had happened here.

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