I wandered into your web site and would like to share this story.

It was August in Wichita (Kansas). Mornings were foggy, fuzzy, rose colored affairs and heavy dew covered everything. I went into work early one morning and arrived at my office around day-break. There around the back entrance to our building were at least a dozen or so perfect webs each so large that you had to be careful coming across the threshold. I don't know anything about spiders, but at the center of each Charlotte-like web was a beautiful creature with dots of orange and red against a brown body. The shape was striking too; sort of pointed and angular on the head and round in the back as I recall. Growing up in east central Florida, we saw so many spiders - I'm very much afraid of them and just about anything else that crawls.

I got my morning coffee and went back outside to smoke my cigarettes before the day began. I stood and marveled at these complicated, symmetrical hangings dripping with dew. None of the inhabitants moved. After a while, the building owner parked in the lot and walked by (as he did every morning). "Will ya look at that! I guess I'll have to call the bug man out..." and with that he walked away.

I was deeply saddened that something so unique and beautiful would be lost--and I'm the guy who just hates these things! Throughout the day I would go outside for a break and try and coax one into a Mason jar I'd slipped from the breakroom cupboard. Early in the afternoon I succeeded in gently pushing the lowest hanging one into the jar. I put a paper towel over
the jar's opening and held it tight with a rubber band. Quietly I put the jar into the floorboard of my truck and went back in to finish my day. When it was time to go home that evening, I walked out to find all the webs destroyed, the spiders writhing on the ground as they died and the smell of chemicals in the air.

I went home thinking of the special morning. How these things created this village overnight and no two were exactly alike. On arriving, I took the little creature into the living room and showed "her" (you know the Charlotte thing--and that's what her name became--how original). We went outside and let her go into the grape vineyard behind our home. Every August we'd look for "her" (knowing it would at best be one of her offspring) and every August we were treated to the artwork of her web strung between two posts. I'm still deathly afraid of spiders, but to this day I'm glad to have made that deep connection.

Rowland Gosling

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