The vibrant leaf colors, the cacophonous geese migrating southward, the nippy-crisp mornings, the cranberry harvest, high school homecoming activities, the occasional spotting of a fuzzy orange and black caterpillar—they all signal fall’s arrival. But there’s one particular harbinger I await for proof-positive that autumn’s officially here.
Sure as the swallows return to Capistrano each year, I know they will come, en masse, to devour the air space between my many rhododendrons, and I eagerly watch for the first sign that they’re back. I learned long ago to walk from the house waving my arms wildly in front of me to avoid coming into actual contact, but from the sanctity of my window, they’re a lovely sight to behold.
The October Spiders are capable of stringing lengths of web a good 20 or 30 feet from the top of the house to the lilac bush in the front yard—how do they do it?
Years ago, I posted a Far Side cartoon in my classroom, showing two large spiders enclosing the end of a playground slide with their web. One spider says to the other, “It’s a long shot, but if this works, we’ll eat like Kings.”
Of course, I was told by the administration at the time to kindly remove the cartoon from my bulletin board, but not before it sparked much interest in our local arachnid architects and their predictable arrival each fall.
Beautiful, albeit a bit scary, October Spiders—the designers of the most creative and wispy websites known to man!