Monday, 24 September 2007 – Charlie’s Web
The temperature feels like summer, but the calendar says early fall. The catalpa tree across the street is paling and the leaves rustle in the giant sycamore in my front yard. Autumn is beginning to slip in.
In this bridge between the seasons, I almost walked into an enormous spider web that spanned the width of my driveway, strung between a white crape myrtle bush and a tall yaupon holly tree. The web itself—the circumference of a bed pillow—was along one side of the driveway.
What kind of spider can make a web this large? I wondered. How can it jump some 16 feet across the driveway to establish the guy-wire, the foundation of the web?
A little research showed me the light brown spider, the size of a large button, is an Orb Weaving spider. It spins the classic shaped web associated with Halloween. It is a non-aggressive and low-toxic spider. The greatest danger to people, I read, is walking into its web at night. The fright of feeling a large spider on your face can give people over 40 a heart attach. Oh sure.
My Orb Weaver is similar to Charlotte, the heroine of E.B. White’s classic book “Charlotte’s Web.” Charlotte was gray, though, and her family is most associated with barns. My spider—Charlie, I think is his name—is more ambitious; traditionally he strings his webs between buildings and shrubs in summer gardens. The driveway seemed a perfect place to catch flies and mosquitoes.
He is shy. By day he hides in the yaupon tree. At night he comes out to check his catch and repair his web.
One day as I stood admiring his web, Louie the yellow cat batted playfully at a pot of tall, ornamental grass and knocked loose one of the web’s anchoring strands. That corner of the web rolled up as fast as a window shade. The next morning, the web had been mended perfectly.
I watched Charlie several days and I spied on him at night. One day was particularly windy. The next day both the web and Charlie were gone.
Had he chosen a less vulnerable place for his web? Had he relocated to another garden? Or had his short life come to an end?
About the same time I visited people in two separate nursing homes. I was full of energy. Some of the patients I saw were active and vital. A few others were slumped in wheel chairs. Some were there temporarily, for others it was a final destination
All of these lives—Charlie, Louie the cat, the other humans and me—are moving through our life cycles at different paces. We are much like Gerald Murphy’s large painting of the golden gears of a watch—different sizes, different speeds.
Charlie, the smallest of us all, has moved on.
Sunday, 16 September 2007 – Oklahoma Weather, Oklahoma Landscape
I’ll tell you something interesting. The title of my newest book is Light and Variable. It’s been out about a year and I have given a number of book signings and talks about it. Not usually, not most of the time, but every single time I have done that, the weather has been anything but light and variable. It has rained torrentially, fogged, snowed, iced and flooded. Coming home from one such talk the first of Tulsa’s three successive ice storms began and before I could get to my garage, the windshield wipers were frozen.
Last week was no exception. Last Saturday morning I drove to Nowata to talk to FOCAS, a group of educators. That was the day we got six inches of rain in an hour. The rain and fog was so heavy I couldn’t see three cars in front of me. Monday morning, I drove to Bristow to do an interview on KREK and then to give a noon talk at the library. Again, heavy rain and fog.
This weather pattern is so uncanny that I think I’ll hire myself out during droughts. Stand me on a parched prairie and let me read from my book and the heavens will open. Send me to fields of dying crops and I’ll tell anecdotes about writing it while the rain begins to fall.
It was a relief to go to Pawhuska last week for another story I’m writing. Since this trip had nothing to do with my book, fine weather was guaranteed. And it was fine. After all the rain this summer, the prairie is still green. I think Osage County—that flat prairie of Bluestem grass—is the most beautiful part of the state. A friend from Paris drove with me. He had never seen this landscape and he was openly delighted with the big expanse of green grassland and clear blue sky.
I’ve been working on another story for Tulsa People magazine about Lynn Riggs, the playwright who wrote “Green Grow the Lilacs: which became the musical “Oklahoma!” After he left OU, he never lived in Oklahoma again, but much of what he wrote in his plays and poetry was about his home state. He especially wanted to capture the folk songs, cowboy tunes and the rhythm of the language. He saw poetry in the people of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Me, too. And in the countryside, which is the landscape of my heart. |
