Many years ago, in the early days of the Internet, I spoke with a vendor from a technology firm, and an analogy that he posed has stuck with me all this time. His company’s search engine was the best, he said, because their spiders were constantly crawling the web to find information. The image was slightly creepy.
There are many options for search engines, often specialized for different interests and needs. With the addition of AI to my search engine, I can get more extensive responses to my questions, all within seconds.
I no longer recall why I was speaking with that long-ago sales person. Technology has never been my strength, but the image of the spiders stays on.
Over the past several months, a web grew outside one of my windows, one floor up from the ground, created by a real live spider. While I am less than tolerant of arachnids, I generally am okay as long as they stay outside. And that web was so pretty, I let it grow.
On one side of the window, there was a structure of sweeping strands, a white cloud of gauzy material. On the other side of the window there was an arresting artistic structure. With two parallel straight lines, zigzags between them, and geometric shapes surrounding the imaginary roadway, the web appeared to be nothing less than a diorama of a small city.
Then one morning, the spider crawled out from its hidey-hole, an indentation in the window frame where a window screen had once fitted in place. The spider was striped orange and black. At first, I thought it was one of my neighbor’s honey bees, soon to become a victim of the web, until I saw its jointed orange legs.
The window is strong and securely locked in place, so I went on to other activities that day, not concerned about the spider. But that night, I got two spider bites, which were quite painful for several days. I knew that the bites could not be the fault of the orange and black spider, locked outside.
The likely culprit was the spider that had drowned overnight in a bucket I keep in the shower to capture excess water. Those bites did not make me happy. I vacuumed thoroughly that day, and sure enough, no more bites.
Still, the experience made me decide that I did not want to take the chance of additional spiders getting inside the house. Most likely they come through the garage. Nevertheless, I opened the window and with my vacuum cleaner, quickly dispatched the web.
I wondered if the spider would return to rebuild the web. I wondered if there were baby spiders lurking in the window frame. I wondered how many insects might have been caught in that beautiful web.
Sure enough, within a couple of days, a web started to appear again. The early architecture of another intricate city, different from the last one, was under construction. An empty circle in the middle of this new small city was reminiscent of a park or lake.
Perhaps it was that empty circle that caused the web’s undoing. A new storm hit the back of my house, demolishing the little city with especially heavy winds. By the next morning, the web had vanished.
The spider still has that cozy little place in the outside window frame to hang out. The question will be whether it starts to build a new web, or perhaps moves on to a safer location.
Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly
From the Spider and the Fly by Mary Howitt, 1829
Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive” by Sir Walter Scott, 1808
Weaving spiders, come not here by William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
