LifeScapes #1

Spider Month at MeadowKnoll

I aspire to become an inhabitant . . . Only by understanding where I live can I learn how to live.—Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

August is Spider Month on our Texas hill country homestead. We find them everywhere in late summer—on the floor, in the yard, dangling overhead. The big mama Golden Orb Weaver —sometimes called a writing spider because of her zigzag web anchor—is our favorite. [Correction via a friend: This is a Garden Spider, Argiope aurantia, also called a writing spider. Good to know!]

This is Louisa, scribbling her ZZs between the trellis and the chicken coop window. Named after Louisa May Alcott (one of the “scribbling women” who so annoyed Nathaniel Hawthorne), she is there every morning when I go out to feed the chickens. At home in her place, industriously writing, connected and contented (I assume) Louisa doesn’t seem to know that I am watching her. She has no idea that—for me—her small spider life has a larger significance.

I’m …