I once lived in an old house in Starkville, Mississippi. It had a porch. My apartment was at the top of some stairs that went up the side of the house. A young woman who drove a beaten-up Maverick lived behind the front door that opened onto the porch.
Coming home one evening, as I started to walk up on that porch, I stopped a few inches from a large spider hanging in front of my face. She had built a huge web that blocked the entire porch.
I looked around the front of the house for a broom or a rake to sweep her away. This felt chivalrous. I was protecting my pretty downstairs neighbor from a scary spider. Of course, how would she know that I saved her from a scary spider she never saw? Yet wouldn’t this only make me more chivalrous?
Then it struck me how cool it looked. The spider’s gray body was the size of a dime, and she was just floating there. The web itself was invisible in the twilight. I had to look all over the area before I caught a shimmer of thread.
I decided that I wasn’t going to be the one to knock her down, so I climbed onto the porch from the side.
Voices below my window disturbed my sleep that night. They were indistinct, but I guessed that they were marveling at the spider.
I was disappointed but not surprised that she was gone in the morning.
But when I got in my car I saw that she had rebuilt her web from the tip the antenna to the windshield wiper in its trough beyond my dashboard. I suppose it could have been a different spider, but my imagination couldn’t accept this idea. My spider had chosen my car for her new home after I had shown her kindness.
For a few seconds, I considered walking to my office on the university campus to leave her in peace. But this seemed a little crazy. It was one thing to take a moment to appreciate the phenomenon and another to act like I had an actual obligation to a spider.
But I did want to see how far I could drive without disturbing her. Starkville is a small town. Between my driveway and campus the speed limit was 25 mph. So I crept down the street. Of course, the farther I drove and watched her gently bounce in her web, the more I wanted to see how long she would stay. How far could this go?
At the end of my day, she was still there. We drove home together very slowly. We even made the same trip to campus the next morning.
When I returned to the car on campus that second day, she was gone. I wouldn’t say that I was sad. It was just a spider after all. But I did have feelings. It felt like it all meant something. And it felt like an ending.
But when I got behind the wheel, I saw that she was now perched on the disk at the tip of the antenna. The disk was tiny, so her legs were really pinched together to grip it. This created the impression that she was determined to stay connected to my car. To me.
Once again, I crept slowly into motion. We made it through the twists and turns getting off campus, but halfway down Main Street, she flew off.
And this definitely felt like a true ending. She just detached. Like the wind had blown loose something inanimate snagged on the antenna. She had died, I figured.
Kenny Nowell 