Webs
Webs – 15 October 2024
Is it just me or is there an abundance of spiders this year?
I’ve seen little house spiders in all the usual spots but much more frequently. I’d be gone for a Montreat weekend and come home to webs spun between furniture legs as though the house had been abandoned. No window was immune to corner cross-hatching, and the porches! I might have made a scarf from all the silk I’ve cleared this year. But there were also some stand outs.
A gorgeous Argiope aurantia, which I’ve always called a writing spider but whose Latin name means “gilded silverface”, built the Platonic ideal of an orb web in the front flower bed between the house and the lemon balm. I don’t usually treat you to so many pictures, but just look at this beauty! I’m particularly pleased with capturing the other splash of yellow in the brown-eyed susan.
One Friday I almost walked into the lattice of a Neoscona domiciliorum. There she hung, chest-height, on the silks spun between a porch chair and the doorframe, glowing in the soft September sun. These spiders, I Iearned through the magic of the world wide web, generally rebuild their webs each night and rest, unseen, during the day. But this one may have needed some extra sustenance before laying eggs, so I’m sorry I had to move the chair.
The next Friday Helene spun her fierce web of destruction, flinging rain and 60+ mph gusts through our porch. I wondered what had become of that Redfemured Spotted Orbweaver. Not to mention all the other creatures uprooted, unmoored, flooded, blown, or thrown by the storm. Personally, our structures and bits of land were mostly spared, and we were mostly just inconvenienced by loss of power. But the scale of devastation to Greenville, Upstate South Carolina, Western North Carolina, my beloved Montreat—it’s unfathomable.
That Saturday, members of Fourth Presbyterian who could receive emails saw this message: Beloved Community, because of treacherous road conditions and the question of whether or not the church will have power tomorrow, we have decided that there will be no Sunday activities at the church. Instead, we are encouraging you to find ways to be the church in your local communities. The power of the church doesn’t depend on electricity. It depends on God’s love, which is embodied in Christ and animated by the Holy Spirit, to witness and serve with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love. So, in lieu of worship in the sanctuary tomorrow, shape your worship into community care, and know that God is with you.
It made me teary then and it does today. The message is Christianity at its best—prophetic, loving, challenging, comforting. Huzzah.
We hosted a service of church members who live near and could get to us. Cathy and Tim Taylor, Buz and Ryann Wilcoxon (shout out to Buz for the idea), and all our children gathered for a time of prayer, scripture, song and reflection. Porch as cathedral, church without walls, spinning our own web of connection. Afterwards, the kids went to jump on the trampoline.
Their shouts of discovery drew Tim, who came back up to the porch to show us the tiny Cope's gray treefrog Dryophytes chrysoscelis. I thought I saw Jesus winking as we all admired the tiny frog that the two professional naturalists who happened to be on hand said they rarely saw because of its clever camouflage. To honor such a special ‘coincidence’, here’s your third picture.
Honestly the past weeks have been a blur. Focusing on a few snapshot memories helps to anchor me in the whirlwind of the aftermath.
We didn’t have power for 10 days, but we had hot water and kind neighbors and balmy weather. We didn’t have internet for 17 days but had cell service and neighbors with charging stations and if I sat on the porch, I could get one bar of internet from Buz and Ryann’s service. Kids were out of school but slept late and hung out with friends and helped out when asked. Furman University was a model of leadership in caring for students, staff, campus and community.
After a week, Jack and I drove to Montreat to clean out the refrigerators and check on the house, but kind friends had already assured us that other than the creek rerouting itself closer to the house, the house was sound. The Ingles parking lot in Black Mountain was an acre of impressive coordinated response—volunteers, FEMA staff, emergency vets—even the people waiting in line were nice.
Mark’s knee replacement surgery could go forward if we had power at home, which we didn’t, so the beloved Kathy and Eric Thomas adopted us for two days which turned into five. Truly, truly God was in that house. By this point my kids were basically feral, couch surfing with kind friend families most of whom I’d at least texted. The dog was holding down our fort. So, while Mark was napping I’d go let the dog out, take a child from friend one to friend two, and come back to Kathy’s with another load of laundry.
On one of those runs home I heard a garbage bin rolling. What the? My neighborhood was still webbed with massive trees tangled in power lines and bisected houses. I looked out the window and sure enough, saw my bin at the end of the driveway and a man walking away. I didn’t recognize him or his dog. Some total stranger had a) known there would be garbage pick-up, b) noticed my bin beside my house, and c) took it upon himself to walk down my driveway and haul the full bin to the street. Wow!
Flush off that beautiful moment of neighborliness I decided to risk stopping when I saw my actual neighbor staring balefully at the web of wires next to her driveway. True to form, she began by lamenting her nausea and her lack of sleep for thinking of the dead bodies whisked away in NC floods and how all of her food was spoiled and there were strangers roaming the neighborhood. I reassured her that the three hulking teenage boys walking around without shirts and sometimes barefoot were Jack and his friends—I pointed out that he was the one in the cast—and that looks to the contrary, they were sweet boys. She harrumphed about how much Jack had grown and she didn’t recognize anyone and she always lost weight when she was anxious like this. I was surprised she didn’t blame the hurricane on the Democrats, but remembered she’d been without Fox News for eight days and refuses to get a cellphone. I made a note to take her some flowers.
Feeling a little low myself this Sunday, I looked up and was surprised to see stars. Stars existing from the beginning of time yet I’d forgotten to look up. Same way I forget to notice God all around me all the time. God older and brighter and truer than all the stars and all the storms
I started to pick out constellations and to remember all the different places and times and people with whom I’ve seen them. When I was nursing babies, I amused my exhausted 2:30 a.m. self by charting the moon phases and seasonal constellations. The stars recall my earlier selves to me as readily as can certain smells. The earlier selves anchor me, reminding me of my own specificity, even in the midst of the spinning universe.
To keep from getting overwhelmed by natural disasters and political disasters and personal disasters, I remind myself to pay attention to the tiny miracles occurring every day. Neighbors being kind. Bodies and bones reknitting. Creatures building shelters, over and over again.
Mark just brought me the gift of this perfect poem from Wendell Berry, whose brevity is always better than my meanderings. Maybe you’ll find it a gift, too.
“Ask the world to reveal its quietude—
not the silence of machines when they are still,
but the true quiet by which birdsongs,
trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms
become what they are, and are nothing else.
”
