A Proper Southern Lady

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Yesterday, I wrote about Jonathan Edward's use of the spider metaphor in his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."  

I would like share a spider metaphor that points to our God of love, but first a little background:

Aragog lives outside our apartment door.  She is a lovely arachnid with a lovely street name:  the golden silk orb weaver. 

She has woven a sweeping web that protrudes slightly over our neighbor’s flower bed below. One end of her web is attached to our patio rail; the other end is attached to the corner of our unit’s vanilla stucco wall. 

Between her exterior web and our patio web, she has spun an interior web.  She is a busy girl.

She is quite impressive.  My daughter, as I wrote before, mentioned Aragog's size, using that faddish new adjective, "ginormous," which is obviously a combination of "gigantic" and "enormous," and may well move beyond popular culture to our national lexicon someday should "ginormous" appear frequently, nationally, even globally, enough by gimillions of people.  

My neighbor who has seen Aragog from below also commented on her size.

"Huge" and "supermalifactorlciousdeathlyomnitrocious" are the words she used. 

My daughter is terrified that Aragog might leap away from her web, hunt her down, and eat her--or worse, bite her so that she dies a long, agonizing death.  

At first I did not know Aragog was a girl.  I just thought she was the prettiest spider I ever saw, and I tend to associate being pretty with being feminine.  

Imagine this girl who comes at your eye with autumn yellow splendor.  Her long legs are covered with black coverlets on her knees.  Her shoes are long black heels only with no insoles for feet.  She could not be any fancier were she atop a diamond broach.

In the morning, before my daily perambulation, I stop to admire how she glows in the stage light cast from our porch bulb.  She eight steps slowly over her web to spin a patch where life has ripped a tear.

During the day, she rarely moves at all.  The greater bulb in the sky reveals her to be a well adorned and proper Southern lady.  

One day, I noticed a small spider standing unmoved near her.  I did not know a whole lot about spiders, short of what I read in Charlotte's Web and saw in the movies, so I did not know much about the tiny newcomer.  

He is a plain sort of fellow.  Brown or black, it’s hard to tell, and not much bigger than a button.  I gave him a name too:  Little Forest.

Every time I pass them by to live my life such as it is outside my home, they give me pause, a good long pause, and I wish I could communicate to them how the moments of amazement they give me make me so happy.

I asked my wife what kind of spider she was.  Uh…Aragog…not my wife.

“A banana spider,” she called up to me where I stood on the balcony one morning as she was getting into her car to go to work.  I went up to google banana spider.  I found a lot of pictures of other golden silk orb weavers. 

Next time, I will share what I learned.

Blessings…