gardeners…

A big-bodied spider has taken up residence in the front corner of the living room, under the edge of the chest. It may be a wolf spider. It was out this morning when I brought in the newspaper, but when I approached with my plastic container to see if I could catch it, it darted back under the chest.

Foiled by the spider, my attention was drawn up and out the window, where a young buck was browsing. I stepped back outside to see that there were two young bucks, brothers, their antlers velvety and perhaps 12 inches tall. They were unperturbed by my watching, nibbling a few bits in my front garden, then moving across the driveway to the neighbor’s more delectable purple clematis. They continued up the sidewalk, their black tails hanging above narrow haunches, their delicate hooves making the faintest tapping on the sidewalk as they strolled and sniffed and browsed their way up the block.

Back in the vegetable garden, where the fava beans and peas and elephant garlic are reaching upward, I see that where the pea vine touches the wire fencing, the leaves are torn and the peas munched.

dawning…

It is so spring.

The sun creeps over the backyard fence to set the crabapple tree alight, a blaze of bright magenta.
The spruce is fringed with tiny tongues of green. Lilacs fatten in the neighbors’ yards. Robins warble at first light. Spiders cast their hungry nets.

A dog lays on her back on the grass, legs in the air, and twists back and forth.

sticky, too

The windows snap, adjusting to the warmth of the sun’s first rays. The spiders are back, rainbow glints of silk flung between leaves, across windows. Belayed in a nearly-invisible curtain down the screen door, dozens of tiny spiderlings descend from a nest. A slender thread cast on breeze and trust stitches together the middle of nowhere.

A speck of dirt on the floor walks away.
—–
spider silk photo