Living With Spiders

Living With Spiders

Kathleen Griffin Artist

Living with Spiders has its emotional strains, they can stress me out. But for none of the usual reasons. I am wary to move them afraid to hurt their tiny legs and I dislike messing up their intricate webs. So they occupy my windows and doorways, until visitors are coming or their webs have become so grandiose that they flex upon my hospitality. As with all living partners there needs to be balance but so long as that is maintained, we live in quiet symbiosis. Contemplating one another, but not interacting, we are artists whose studios are side by side. We don’t’ converse but each day I notice your work, your intricate weaving, the brilliance of the pattern. Yesterday, I accidentally swept a large portion down from the one in the bathroom, as I took the towels from the dryer, but today, without complaint she relaxes happily in the sunlight of that same window on a freshly woven design, pulled from her body in silver wisps. I will let her sit there a little while longer, at least until I have finished washing the floor. Until all the water has dried.

Living with spiders has its emotional strains, they can stress me out. But for none of the usual reasons. I am wary to move them afraid to hurt their tiny legs and I dislike messing up their intricate webs. So they occupy my windows and doorways, until visitors are coming or their webs have become so grandiose that they flex upon my hospitality. As with all living partners there needs to be balance but so long as that is maintained, we live in quiet symbiosis. Contemplating one another, but not interacting, we are artists whose studios are side by side. We don’t’ converse but each day I notice your work, your intricate weaving, the brilliance of the pattern. Yesterday, I accidentally swept a large portion down from the one in the bathroom, as I took the towels from the dryer, but today, without complaint she relaxes happily in the sunlight of that same window on a freshly woven design, pulled from her body in silver wisps.

I will let her sit there a little while longer, at least until I have finished washing the floor. Until all the water has dried. Across the small bathroom the sunlight traces her lines. Their tension creates a composition that maintains its fascination throughout. They are patterned but not rigid. Minute irregularities necessary for true expression. I feel her efforts in it and admire them. My own drawings on the table could learn a lot from her. I also prefer tense delicate lines, and form which is held with minimal mark. Admittedly, she may be better than I am. But we are so different it’s hard to make such comparisons or judgments. Today a roommate is coming. There is no way to explain that you live in the window in the bathroom and your friend lives in the doorway at the entry, or that there are two more of you occupying the large wrap around porch. So with a guilty gesture I scoop you into the edge of the broom and carry you to the dirt outside, beside the stairs. Its August, its moving day I suppose for lots of things, new starts for everyone. I move to the porch. The largest spider. She isn’t my favorite, I have more intimacy with the bathroom spider as our studios are so close together. but her web is very impressive extending over five feet, connecting the hanging metal flower basket to the floor and chair.

I remember once I made a room like this, also over months, with lines almost as fine as hers. Of long brown curly hair like my sisters, bought at the wig shop, tied with tweezers in a precise pattern. The hair almost invisible made walls, shimmering and mysterious, inside the walls I suspended window frames the only concrete form, the walls breathing themselves. Nearly impossible to photograph, it was wondrous to see and walk towards, a ridiculous feet of labor. Even those photographs are gone now. The lightest of structures, the ephemeral suggestions of home and family and place, woven from the hair of my sister with windows like my parents’ house, and no house that had existed. But like the spiders web the walls asked questions of how much or how little it takes to create a space and what it captured in the sticky lines we trace around ourselves and the windows we peer to from. In my work only those views were solid.

Not so my spider. She treats it all in equal gesture, but her eyes are different too, so I am not sure what she would say on the matter. But she is disinclined to visit with me anyway. She looks at me from the center of her web where she is still sitting. I think she senses impending move. She has begun to shake her web. I fear we will no longer be friends after this, “Yeah honey I get it, this is gonna seem like some real bullshit to you” but you are so strong and resilient. The new web will be even better, the lines more free, perhaps connecting the trees to the grass as you move from the city, and the hard urban lines of my wooden porch and I go back to drawing before the roommate arrives.