The New Year's Spider

Spiders are not my favorite creatures by any means.  Brushing against or breaking a spider web on a forest trail gives me shudders and launches me into frantic efforts to clear the web away from my hair and body as quickly as possible.  Yet, I also somehow find myself curiously drawn to the life of spiders in their webs.  They seem to be infinitely patient, yet at the same time ready to pounce at the slightest vibration.  I can't be the only one who has done this, but I have to admit occasionally tossing small bits of leaves or twigs into webs to test the spider's reaction.  But once in while you get a taste of the real action.

I remember years back, I believe it was in Texas, while living the life of a door-to-door salesperson, I chanced upon a rocky vacant lot in a suburban track.  I was both horrified and captivated to see a number of black widows making their homes among the rocks.  And one life-or-death struggle caught my attention in particular.  An unfortunate large grasshopper, which had jumped the wrong way, ended up partially trapped in the thick fibers of a black widow’s nest.  I watched as it valiantly struggled and sought to fend off the approaching black widow.  Amazed I saw that the black widow was very cautious, sensing that the grasshoppers thrashing forelegs could do it some damage.  If recollection serves me right, the miraculous occurred-the grasshopper escaped!

Well, in more recent years my spider watching has been limited to my new stomping grounds in western Japan. Here the spiders are not so exotic.  But there is one type of spider that, while not fancy, has often caught my attention. Only of medium size, with long legs, it likes to make large symmetrical webs of up to two feet across, whose supporting strands, anchored to tree limbs, fences, telephone poles and the like, sometimes span several yards.  Exactly the kind of spider web you might run into walking down a wooded trail. 

These greenish-brown spiders start out small in late summer, and grow rapidly in size as they gorge on unfortunate autumnal insects that stray into their grasps.  But by early December the ranks of these arachnids are noticeably thinning.  There is the natural attrition from the elements: wind, rain, starvation, and of course from those clumsy humans who stumble into their engineering works.  I’m sure there must be some spider-eating birds as well, although I’ve yet to witness it in person.  But for those who do make it to December, it is Old Man Winter who deals the final blow.  Now winters in western Japan are far from artic.  But the temperatures can and do dip below freezing now and then, with an occasional snowfall.  Everyone knows that even warm-blooded humans don’t fare very well, especially in the buff, in freezing temperatures.  So I’m impressed by the tenacity of some spiders, which hold on as long as they do.

In fact, the area right above our front door is one such haven for holdout spiders.  Every year, without fail, one of the fore-mentioned greenish-brown spiders fashions a web there, using a metal support for the second floor of the apartment building, the wall and a covered electric porch light as anchoring sites for its creation.  A web in that location has a couple of key advantages.  First, it is relatively protected from the wind and rain, being under the metal front porch of the apartment right above us.  Second, as the front door light is often on at nighttime, it becomes a natural magnet for mesmerized bugs of all descriptions.  So there is protection from the elements and an enormous food supply.  A last slight advantage comes into play as the weather becomes colder.  When the light is on it provides some warmth to the environs, which could make the difference between life and death for a shivering spider, at least for a while.

One year ago it was sometime in December when our resident spider finally gave up the ghost.  I remember one cold day brushing against something with my head (ugh!).  Looking to the side I saw the limp, lifeless spider dangling from a filament of web.  Apparently as its strength gave out and it could no longer hold onto the web, it had fashioned a last resort life line, but to no avail. My revulsion in that icky moment though was matched by a sense of pity for a creature I’d become familiar with over the last few months, as well as a feeling of admiration for its tenacity to hold onto life as long as it did.

Well I’m sure that we had cleared away the remnants of the web above our door not too long after that.  Nevertheless, come late summer a shiny, brand-new web was already under construction.  Was this new spider part of the brood of the previous one, whose eggs had somehow survived despite our best efforts?  Or was it just a wandering, homeless sort that stumbled upon our porch?  Whatever the case, the new web bore an uncanny resemblance in placement and size to ones in previous years.  And like its predecessors, as the warm days of early autumn gave way to cooler ones, the spider prospered on the abundant menu of small insects that our porch light attracted.

You would think I might have better things to mull over, but many times as I passed by, and as the days became ever colder, I couldn’t help wondering how long my new friend would hold on.  For yes, not all people let spiders go unmolested, untouched right in front of their noses, hanging right above their front door.  It would have to be either someone very lazy, who just couldn’t bother to take a few seconds to run and fetch a broom, or someone with a soft, romantic streak in his heart.

Truth be told, I don’t like killing anything.  In my boyhood, I often tried to rescue ants that had been washed into our sink when it was my turn to wash dishes. When the occasional cockroach shows up in our apartment, my own preference would be to trap it and take it gently outside (far enough away of course that it would have trouble finding its way back again).  But, because of my wife I usually end up smashing them.  This just goes to show that if you’re going to kill a bug, you’d better do it quickly and get it over with.  If not, sentimentality or maybe curiosity about another living thing might get the best of you.  And you know, it’s strange, but if you pass by a spider each and every day, your lives become connected in some intangible way. 

So I’m a softy, and I have to admit I’d fallen for our resident spider, saddened to know, of course, that its days were numbered.  Ah yes, but how many days would that be?  Would it hold on longer than the hardy survivor from the previous year?  By early December we’d had our first nights dipping close to or below freezing, but the spider looked in fine form.  Around the middle of December we had our first snowflakes, which melted harmlessly upon touching the ground.  Still, the spider was hanging in there.  Well, I did begin to notice that its web was no longer firm and taut.  It began to have the look of a frayed and stretched hammock, with bits of leaves hanging here and there.  Hmm, I started to get worried.  Maybe the old girl just didn’t have it in her anymore to lift herself on her tired legs and mend and tidy up her home.  Maybe it was just too darn cold.

On Christmas morning we awoke to see a beautiful snowfall of 3 or 4 inches that added a magical touch to the world outside.  Protected by its roof above, however, my favorite spider had survived unscathed.  Just how long was this gal going to live?  Was she going to try and make it to next spring, or what?  If so, with no other insects left around to deliriously circle our porch light, the spider was going to lead a pretty lonely and hungry existence.

As you may have noticed, I titled this piece, “The New Year’s Spider”.  For this centenarian of the arachnid world finally met her fate on New Year’s Day, 2012.  And no, it was not an undignified ending, such as falling out of her web, like her predecessor. Rather, she fell victim to a time-honored Japanese tradition: New Year’s cleaning.

In Japan New Year’s Day is the most important holiday of the year and the preparation for it wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory thorough house cleaning. Our household is not as traditional as most; nevertheless, my Japanese wife, while tempered by years of living overseas, still gets the cleaning itch as the year winds down.  Late, but true to tradition, it was New Year’s afternoon when she decided the unsightly spider web outside our front door had outlived its welcome.  Cheerily she told me, “I cleaned away the spider web from outside the door.”  Momentarily the universe paused in its orbit as a surge of some unidentified emotion coursed through my frame. The best I could muster in response was “What did it do, how did the spider die?”  “Oh, I don’t know. I just wrapped it up its web, and that was it” was the matter of fact reply.

Yes, the space above our door was clean, as I guess by all rights it should be. Its gleaming emptiness though mirrored a melancholic void in my own heart.  But life is amazing and resilient.  As sure as the winter chill will give way to the warmth of spring, odds are high that come next summer, a newly hatched baby spider will make its way up our wall with spindly legs.  And true to the instinct that has helped millions of generations of its kind to survive, it will somehow know intuitively that it has found its ideal home. I hope I’ll be there to see it- and quietly urge it on.