The Story of God and the Golden Silk Orb Weaver

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

A few months ago my daughter announced, "Oh my god!  There's a ginormous spider by the front door. It's huge, dude, absolutely as big as my hand."   

I checked it out.  Sure enough, we had a new member literally attach itself to our patio.  

She is a big old girl, about two or three inches, although when I first saw her I did not know she was a she.  

I named her Aragog right away.  I almost named her Hagrid, or even Charlotte, but I decided a neuter name would be best.

Her six black eyes fan out on the top of her head like a vase if I connect the three dots on one side and the three on the other.  

The biggest part of her body, her abdomen, is quite the lovely backpack.  It is the shape of a whale's head with a multitude of white spots embedded in a pouch that is as red-yellow as the sun at mid-horizon.  

I have never seen a spider like this one in Tennessee or North Georgia.  Most of the arachnids I had seen were on television, the movies, or the brown ones scurrying on the ground and the few black ones secure in their webs inside basements, within hedges, or along other balconies I have known.  

The size of this spider surpassed any I had ever seen before in the wild.  It does give one pause to see such a large arachnid.

Now, many people are terrified of spiders: including my daughter, Ronald Weasley, and just about every teenager I ever met.  

I find this to be most curious.  It is an irrational fear, a phobia as some would diagnose it.  I wonder if its source is a lack of exposure to nature during childhood.  

Spiders are such tiny, innocuous animals for the most part.  Only a few are lethal. Around here the recluse spider should be respected.  But for the most part, the lethal ones do not live out in the open.

Indeed, when compared to a bear, a mountain lion, a shark, or a Homo sapiens, spiders are relatively harmless.  

At first I related to this spider from what I remembered after reading Charlotte's Web.  I knew she would not live very long.  I hoped she would spin "Some Husband" or "Some Stepfather" into her web on days my wife or daughter were not being very happy with me.

I marveled at how splendid and intricate was her huge web spread across a quarter of our patio.  

I noticed our gnat population had gone away.  In fact, I have not been bitten once near my home this summer.  The moths that flock near our door light at night are gone as well.

  

Inside her web were many tiny sacks of food she had caught.  I had hoped to see an insect fly into her web and watch her pounce on it and immobilize it with her venom.

That is cruel of me, but that was one part of Charlotte's story that I never forgot.

I'll continue my musing about my golden silk orbed weaver and relate it to God's story next time.

Blessings...