I coexist among a cluster of spiders that occasionally ensnare me in their silky webs. I stand on the floor of my tiny house and let my gaze drift from one sweep of dusty strands to another, lamenting my carelessness in leaving the cleaning wand outside in last winter’s rainy season. When I lean against the pillows to read at night, I catch sight of the intricate weavings spanning the space between my window and the small shelf holding mementos. From within an antique frame, great-grandmother Corinne stands next to her husband, staring at me with a slightly insulted air.
Spiders kill flies, so I usually let them escape the broom’s wrath. But their webs annoy and embarrass me. I can’t have unexpected company, except someone benign and forgiving like my friend Michelle whose six acres south of the town of Isleton harbors many critters large and small. As she washed dishes in my tiny sink after a recent, impromptu dinner, she smiled with no insignificant measure of understanding as I brushed another sticky mess from my face. I feel as though I just got rid of all these nasty things, I muttered, though in truth it has been at least a month since my last cleaning rampage.
A few years ago, a neighbor in her tiny house screeched. I ran over and stood at her door, calling to her, asking if she needed help. She came outside and sank to her porch steps. There’s too many spiders here, she gasped. I replied, Yes, and they’re winning. She stared at me for a few tense minutes before a grin broke out across her weary face.
When I first moved to the Delta, people back home would ask what it was like living in a park. Exactly how you think, I often told them without any kind of explanation. In truth, it’s dirty, and windy, and filled with all manner of creatures — coyotes, and voles, and gophers, and a whole slew of feral cats (some descended from a wild female that I tried to adopt two Christmases ago). Woodpeckers hammer at the tasty cedar of my house’s exterior. Scrub jays squawk in loud protest if they find empty bird feeders. Little grey rodents dash across the levee road. And birds, everywhere: Hummingbirds and egrets and falcons and hawks; songbirds and finches and herons.
In 1992, I moved back to Kansas City from Arkansas. After getting settled, I loudly proclaimed that I had exhausted my capacity for country living. I shook the mountain dirt from the soles of my Doc Martens and declared myself returned to an urban existence for eternity. Yet decades later, I closed my law practice, sold my beloved Brookside bungalow, and head west on the heels of my small wheeled dwelling to live amongst in the untamed California Delta. I do not know what possessed me. Perhaps the long-ago lover who wrote a poem comparing me to an arachnid had some glimmer of prescience.
The spiders and I have stricken a sort of truce between us. They stay out of my bedding and only occasionally crawl into my favorite Frankoma coffee mug to nest or die. In turn, I swat down only as much of their self-constructed housing as necessary to feel sufficiently good about my housekeeping to have the occasional friend come by for coffee. The spiders have not exactly accepted me, but once I admitted that they were, after all, here first, the atmosphere got a little less tense.
It’s the ninth day of the one-hundred and twenty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
In memory of a St. Louis sister
SARA TEASDALE
08 August 1884 – 29 January 1933