So, it's always a wonder and an interest, but apparently those spider birth pics have enthralled the most amount of people visiting this blog since the inane jd-debacle, if emails, phonecalls, facebook, blog comments, shivers etc are any indication of enthrallationism.

One friend called thinking I must be in a beyond-despair depression if I was taking pictures of such dense creepy macabre... until of course, she thought about it and began to wonder if mayhaps I'm not as frightened or disgusted by spiders as other normal folks.

Other friends have bemoaned the fact that they've never seen such a birth, which startled me, since it seems like at least 10% of my childhood must have been spent watching such little bursts of speed and dropaway.

For some reason, our screen door at The Old Lynden House, where I lived from age 2 to 8 (eating cat food, always eating cat food), collected these spider spring births with regularity, and I remember watching more than one. Sometimes the spiderbags were deposited not exactly on the screen door, but rather near the screen door along the side of the old freezer that hoarded my multi-hued Popsicles. I checked the spiderbags' status tri-daily when I went for a withdrawal, and would get jumping excited when the bags were about ready to hatch.

And as I did this time, I would sit very still, watching them open and the tremendous number of different paths traced downwards, through air, on a floating string or along a crack, and I'd blow on them as they hatched - which for some reason encourages spiders along in their travels, perhaps replicating too closely an imminent thunderstorm or the breath of a hungered marauder. I don't have a good reason for thinking it, but spider births are really very beautiful.

So to be clear, I've always since adored spiders.

I once dated a girl who would give me a warning when she had reached the peak of her spider-cuddling abilities, and I would have three minutes on the nose to rush the house with a glass, capturing and releasing out-of-doors as many spiders as I could before she would whip out the vacuum cleaner and send me to near-tears as I imagined the remaining snuffed-out spiders suffocating slowly while trying to claw their way from within vast accumulations of the shed skin, hair and dirt we brought in filthily to their sculptured domains and then vacuumed up with them, just as if they and their weavings were nothing but ours to kill.

Indeed, a boy in high school once asked me rather politely if I would like to perform artificial respiration on one such insect who had been ruthlessly slain by a teacher with a rolled-up newspaper. I had been so furious that a bit of lather had gathered near my left cheek. And I'll say this: since then I've tried to give artificial respiration to a baby dolphin that died in our fishing net up north, and I friggin bawled when it didn't work - that small sleek creature - but I also don't draw as many lines I think between the webwork of water and corner; spiders are far stupider, granted, and they don't look at you so wisely, but they are travelers and collectors as well as killers (dolphins afterall kill fish), and this is partially why I respect them.

So, basically, I took about a hundred pictures of those spiders, and considered their birth a welcoming in.

But back to the bottle of worms... Liz, Liz C, Mz Liz - whom I've been missing so much and didn't realize how much I had come to depend on having you just around the corner, with your shelves of esoteric mystery, your little ladies, and that fireplace a haven for clicketyClack - I would like you to meet Siegfried:


Yes, and what a doll is he! Still doing wonderfully too, surrounded as he is by Balthazar:


& Gertrudes (she's the nasturtium mixed in between the unnamed Wally & Sunny):


Not to mention the rest of my kitchen babies, only one other yet named (because I am waiting to see if they survive the Uhaul trucking from Here:


to There [with Sabine in the foreground]:


A transplant which has caused them to meet Herr Slugs, one of the evil evil local nemeses, who fills my nights with fits of fretting freakouts involving flashlights and barefeet on my smooth red patio with the dewy grit between juncture and another awful flitteringly irritated fidget. Enough so, enough fits that is, that I have manufactured the glistening hermaphrodites a little house, replete with their frigid sunset [Samuel Adams].

)

Yep, so. I must get to bed soon, as I am set tomorrow to do some needed Pickup Hours at my mom's clinic. But three more things: I kayaked again a new little lake, the one I normally walk the dog around, and found I can paddle around it 2x as fast as walking, which maybe means I should do two laps, but I also (2) swam afterwards for the first time this year, and was so happy to not be in chlorine but still be in water, and to be diving around - and oddly enough, the temp was perfect: not too cold or too warm, which surely the bay will be when I swim in it, as per tradition, on the 4th.

AND I'm starting to feel stories again, but have been very bad about recording them, and so have decided to make a Go-Elsewhere schedule for writing, beginning soon, meaning, here's the view out my new kitchen at dawn: