Last year we had this enormous and beautiful spider who made her web at the fence by the horse pasture. Her web was maybe ten feet long. One side attached to tree branches, another side to the horse fence. There were other strands that anchored to other places. And it was more than a one-sided web, at least two-dimensional, several layers of web to snare the unsuspecting insect. None of it looked very substantial, but the web lasted for what seemed to me to be a long time.
One day I went out and she was gone. But I was hoping that she left her egg sac, that her offspring would come back. And this year, they did -- not in the same place but close by with a web just as amazing. And the next generation built a web just as amazing.
One day soon, this next generation will be gone. It is close to that season. But I hope she will leave her egg sac, as her mother did, and that there will be another web next year.
And I remember from my Hebrew classes that the word for hope has its roots in the idea of spider web. So maybe it is built into those spiders’ nature to hope for nourishment, to hope for survival, to hope for next year. Maybe that is built into me, too. And I hope their beauty lives on in the next generations, and that I have eyes to see that beauty and constancy.
