The secret world of spiders and web-spinners…

Somewhere along the way our pup has conned me into a particular morning routine.

She’s good about waiting patiently in her kennel until I wake up. I set her free from her nightly confinement and give her a happy ‘good morning’ petting. Rosie races up the stairs and, I confess that for me, it’s more of a trudge. Then, still in my flannel pajama pants, I blearily jam my feet into my gumboots, pull on a wooly chore coat, and take her for a walk to do her business.

We do this every single morning no matter what the weather.

The other day it was misty and threatening rain so I tried just waiting on the deck, hoping she would need to pee badly enough that she’d just go out into the yard and get the job done.

Nope.

She just stood there looking at me.

So back into the house I went for the umbrella and away we went; Rosie racing happily down the path ahead of me.

If you’re thinking I could just stop at this point and wait for her…you’re wrong. I’ve tried. It doesn’t take her long to notice I’m no longer bringing up the rear guard and she races back to wherever I’ve stopped and bounces and spins at my feet until I laughingly admit defeat and we carry on.

Christmas in July…

This morning began the same, but we only got as far as the big spruce by the shed when I stopped.

It rained last night. The scent of it was still heavy in the air and it was cool – cool enough that a light fog was making everything look soft. But that wasn’t what caught my attention.

It was the delicate strands of silken spider web draped from branch to branch, looking very much like garland on a Christmas tree.

It was…beautiful.

Normally, I think, you wouldn’t be able to see the fine lengths of web, but with the moisture still in the air, minute droplets were clinging to it making it appear as infinitesimal beads on a string. Looking up I could see small webs had been built at the tips of nearly every branch on the tree.

As far as my eye could see…

The truly amazing thing was that it wasn’t just that one spruce tree that was covered with spider web, it was very nearly the entire woods.

I spent so much time gazing off into the trees on our walk, that when my eyes finally focused on the path ahead I had to stop suddenly and duck my head to avoid a strand of web that spanned the path – a good eight feet or more from the spruce to the aspen on the opposite side.

How many spiders live in our woods? How could they do all this in just one night?

The answer is probably more spiders than I could possibly imagine and they probably don’t do it all in one night. I expect it was the raindrops and mist that made the webs (most of which had probably been there for quite some time) visible.

I suppose not everyone would feel the same way about the spider webs hanging in their path. Arachnophobes might be happier never seeing the vast amount of web decorating our trees.

When the invisible is made visible…

I think it’s lovely. And it mostly goes on unnoticed and unseen, until inclement circumstances suddenly make it visible.

People – and life – can be very much the same.

We carry on about our days and life happens. We have happy moments and often we have difficulties, little challenges along the way. We learn to navigate and manage the day to day stressors until one day, something much bigger and much harder happens that challenges us.

And mostly, I think that’s when we find out that we’ve gotten much stronger than we realized.

It’s when the rain falls and we face our challenges head-on with a courage we didn’t yet know we possessed, that the silken strands of strength and resiliency built quietly and over time are there to support us as we forge ahead.

A lesson – and an new appreciation for the hidden world in my backyard – I would have missed if my pup didn’t insist on being accompanied for her morning constitutional.

What would I do without her?

For more lessons learned from my walks in our woods, you can check out this post: Robert Frost, winter woods, and letting go…