more about spiders, plus photos for the Z!

post #99
     After doing some research on-line I learned that the spider whose web I showed in the last post is a very common SPINED MICRATHENA which nonetheless has a weird shape. The female spins the web, in the woods.  The male later swings in to fertilize her and often does not survive the encounter.   
     The truth is there seem to be a lot more weird looking spiders than I realized.  The "web site" here shows some of them.  Enjoy the wonder of these amazing spiders!

    Also weird was how my current reading coincided with my spider sighting.  Last weekend I was reading a book that George Ella gave me for my birthday, back in May.  She knows I am a huge E. B. White devotee; the book is The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic by Michael Sims (Walker and Co., 2011).  I happened to be reading Chapter 14, called Spinning.  It covers the research and information White gathered about spiders.  How surprised I was to be researching spiders at the same time.  He had the New York Public Library and his barn, while I have the internet and the woods.  We would both thank the human beings who figure out all this stuff about what is in the world.

     By the way, the book is interesting, but it suffers from one unavoidable drawback: the writing is not at all E. B. White's.

      The news on the Appalachia, Bluebird, Creek book is good -- George Ella has written words now and has made a draft of the layout.  It is as if still another of her ideas is sown and nourished and then brings forth, like a miraculous plant.  In this case, things have been enriching themselves for at least a year.  The last line now reads "by Zucchini and Zinnias."  This development encouraged me to find straight away some zucchini and zinnias to photograph -- no time to waste since it is already the middle of August.  So, with thanks to Sandy for growing zucchinis and to those friends with zinnias, here are some possible photos for future use:

almost the last two zucchinis in Sandy's garden

There were several watermelons as well hiding in her lush garden.

She also had these zinnias.

These zinnias surround Marjorie and George's mailbox.

This is the road all of us around here use, curvy though it may be.

  These photos are not the final say, but, as always, I enjoy sharing the process of the path-- equally curvy as this road -- which is used to reach a final expression in literature or art.