Ode to a Spider

She came into my life early this summer, in June, when she chose to build her home on the front wall of our home. Her meticulously woven, elaborate web was a marvel and she tended to it fastidiously, picking out debris, and mending it even if it had the slightest tear. I let her be, and admired her web each time I stepped out.



She was a Texas Writing Spider or Argiope aurantia, with the most striking orange and black coloration I've ever seen. Wiki says: "The circular part of the female's web may reach two feet in diameter. Webs are built at elevations from two to eight feet off the ground."

Her web was truly grand, and bore the signature of her species, in neat and confident zorro-strokes right down the middle. She was very young then, a slim and slender girl with long legs.



Wiki says: "Yellow garden spiders breed once a year. The males roam in search of a female, building a small web near or actually in the female's web, then court the females by plucking strands on her web. Often, when the male approaches the female, he has a safety drop line ready, in case she attacks him. After mating, the male dies, and is sometimes then eaten by the female."

She took her time finding a mate, and eventually chose a brave young lad who dared to give his life for her attention. This is how I found him one morning, a month later in July.



She was a woman now and eating for two (thousand). She rapidly gained weight and I often saw her eating large insects that she had caught on her pretty web. She extended her web and climbed higher, so that I could photograph her from inside the house, and capture the beauty of her back.


One night in August exactly a month later, after we had turned off all the lights and gone to bed, she spun a small, secure little net under the moonlight and deposited in it her tightly sealed egg sac which held her babies. She secured it snugly to the wall, and stayed by its side for the next couple of days, protecting it and resting.

Wiki says: "She lays her eggs at night on a sheet of silky material, then covers them with another layer of silk, then a protective brownish silk. She then uses her legs to form the sheet into a ball with an upturned neck. Egg sacs range from 5/8" to 1" in diameter."



Once she was sure that her babies were safe, she returned to her web nearby and remained there for another month. One morning in September I didn't find her at her usual place and got worried. As I searched around, I found her higher up on the same wall, and found another little egg sac by her side. She had secured this one as before, but quite a bit higher, possibly to reduce competition between her babies when they hatched.

Wiki says: "She guards the eggs against predation as long as she is able. However, as the weather cools, she becomes more frail, and dies around the time of the first hard frost."

She came back down last week to her original spot. Now that it's November, nights have become increasingly cold, and we just had a string of very cold nights. I kept a close watch on Argiope.

She had built herself a small, messy web near the wall, close to her first batch of eggs. The small web was torn and had a lot of debris on it. I thought about how fastidiously she used to clean her web in her youth, and knew she was losing her strength.

This week, after a particularly cold and windy Sunday night, I checked on her first thing in the morning, and she was gone. I looked for her, but cannot find her. She spent her entire life on this front wall of our house, so wouldn't have just wandered away.

Her web was in front of the lower right window, and her second egg sac is circled in orange near the top right window.



Over the past 6 months I've grown so used to checking on her as I leave the house, and looking for her as I get back, that it's become a habit. I still do it. Only, her web now hangs torn and messy on the front wall.

Come Spring, her babies will hatch and find their way in life. I hope one of her daughters will again choose our wall to make her home on, and I will have her company all next summer.

P.S. I had posted some of these pictures over the summer, but now that Argiope is gone, I thought it would be good to compile them together and tell her story.

Right to Dry

I've been line-drying my laundry for a little more than a year now. I love it. This is the way we dry clothes in India, hanging clothes on a line on the terrace. I used to love smelling the sun on the clean clothes when in the evening I'd go to the terrace to bring them back.



After moving to the US, I took to using the dryer like everyone else, and it is convenient. But we live in a house with a large backyard now, and I am constantly on the lookout for ways to live more lightly on the planet. So this was the next logical step.



Some of the t-shirts come back a little shapeless, so once they are dry, I spin everything in the dryer for a couple of minutes and they are fine. Most of the electricity here (and most other places) comes from coal, and this is a very dirty form of energy. So any reduction in its use will lessen my contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere.



But this is not a completely noble mission. I have to admit that I love the process of hanging clothes out to dry, feeling the grass under my feet and the sun on my shoulders, hearing the birds in the backyard and watching the little insects that sometimes crawl on the clothes.



I find it very soothing and relaxing. Raghav admitted that there's something very comforting about seeing laundry on the line in the yard. But I'm not the odd one out in this ...



... there is the Right to Dry campaign, where people are demanding their right to dry their clothes on a clothesline. Here's an article that talks about this campaign & the controversy. Many neighborhoods in the US don't allow people to dry their clothes outside. I don't know if there is an issue with this in our neighborhood, but I don't think there is. In any case, we have a fenced yard, and our neighbors cannot see our line. :)

The laundry basket makes woven shadows while it waits for the clothes to dry ...



As the sun sets, we have a basket full of clean, sun-soaked laundry that smells like the fresh outdoors!


Until the next time ...

Painted Mirrors 1

Here are the results of my newest preoccupation ... painted mirrors


I have one more almost done, another one already given to a friend and yet another one half made. Three others wait for their turn while I think of ideas ...



It's rainy and pleasant in Austin. Fat cat sits at my feet, scared. It's ideal weather for some hot pakoras and ginger chai ... yum. :)

Hope your week's going well!

Creative hiking

We had gone hiking last weekend with a group that likes to combine being with nature and creating art. Though it seems like the most obvious thing to do, this was my first time doing this. In all the countless times I've gone hiking, I've never stopped to sketch or paint what I saw or felt! So this was interesting.

We went to the Grelle Recreation Area in Spicewood, Texas. The trail was a short, 2 miles through some hilly land, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were some pretty tall trees there, with plenty of shade - something you cannot take for granted in Texas.



We soon came to our first creative stop. Here we disbanded for about 20 minutes, when each of us went off to observe and create - one person wrote beautiful words, another took photos and yet another person made some sketches. I found this fallen log and first took some pictures.



When I went closer to the log, I found on it lots and lots of prickly seed pods!


They had all burst open already, and were scattered all over the log along with small dried brown leaves. As I looked at them, it seemed as if I was looking at a bunch of discarded fake eyelashes!


The more I thought about them looking like eyelashes, the more they seemed like little tree-eyes to me! The image of a tree with lots of seed-pod eyes popped into my head and so I put away my camera and started a sketch, which I later finished at home. Raghav thinks it looks creepy. :)




The seed pods were so amazing that I wanted to bring some home with me. I almost did, but then it didn't feel right to move them from this place where they belonged, so I took some pictures of them to take with me.



We continued the hike after this first creative stop. The trail was quite wooded and pretty.



One cannot go into the wilderness in Texas and not see cacti!



At our second creative stop, I took a bunch of bark pictures. There were several interesting trees there with totally different types of bark. I will save those pictures for another post. Raghav got this interesting shot of a tiny jumping spider!



Further along the hike, I was amazed to see Fall colors - here in Texas!


Towards the end, the trail flattened out to where there usually is a lake. It was totally dry that day though, but the ground was covered with these little plants that smelled absolutely heavenly! No idea what kind of plant it was.


As we finished the little hike, the landscape was flat and open. Very serene and the perfect image of Fall.


I think I like this "hiking for the creative types" group and am looking forward to the next trip already!

It's Halloween again

It's Halloween and for a month now, the ghoulish decorations have been up outside homes in our area. Walks in the neighborhood are all the more interesting now because some people always come up with different and weird ideas to spook people. I took pictures of the ones that I liked most ...


The tradition of Halloween was brought to the US by Irish immigrants, but it's now celebrated by ALL children here (mainly as a way to stock up on candy for the year :)), by the candy and costume-making industry for obvious reasons, and by adults who get creative for costume parties - which can be pretty fun.

Halloween originated from the ancient Celtic festival Samhain, which is a harvest festival. During this time, the ancient pagans stocked up on livestock meat for the winter, and built huge bonfires where the slaughter waste was burned. Since winter was a time of disease and death, which they associated with evil spirits, they wore costumes and masks to ward them off, or to mimic them.

The name itself comes from All Hallows' Even (for evening) as it is the eve of "All Hallows' Day" or "All Saints Day".


A couple of houses have got this giant spider web with a giant yellow & black spider, which I hadn't seen before. In one house they had set it up to go all the way from a tree to the ground, which looked great. But I couldn't get a picture of that one. One of my neighbors had it too, and I got a picture of theirs.


There are the ghosts hanging from trees, of course.


And witches with poor navigation skills ...

The Jack-o'-Lantern can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, who was a greedy, gambling, hard-drinking old farmer. The legend goes that he tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the tree trunk. Angered, the devil cursed Jack, condemning him to forever wander the earth at night with the only light he had: a candle inside a hollowed turnip.

I didn't carve my little pumpkin this year. No specific reason why not ... but here's my power-point Jack-o'-Lantern.


There usually is a pizza gathering on our street on the evening of Oct 31st, to which parents bring kids in costumes. After the get together, the kids go trick-or-treating. I haven't yet bought treats ... am thinking of buying dried fruit packets this year, to make it a little healthy.


The setting sun lights up the neighborhood during our walk. There are lots of deer here too. Didn't see one on this day, though.

Have a great weekend!

Pumpkin Season

October is the season of color - bright orange, brown & all shades of yellow, and warm, glowing sunlight which sets the colors on fire. This was a time of wonder for me when I lived in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where trees slowly turn from green to light shades of yellow to orange & red, before softly floating to the ground.

Here in Texas the change of seasons is not marked by such a brilliant display. Still, the orange hues do make it here in the form of pumpkins!


I thoroughly enjoy taking pumpkin pictures. We used to drive up to a farm in North Georgia every October when we lived in Atlanta, to take some pictures. This morning we went looking for a pumpkin patch in Austin.

We found a church that has been selling pumpkins seasonally in its yard for the past 15 years. They had the bright orange globes scattered all over the yard, catching the sunlight and glowing like they were on fire!


There were pumpkins of all sizes, some huge and some tiny. And some of them had interesting patterns on them ...

with bright orange bodies and deep green eyes.


Some dared to be different from all the others ...

And some were metallic green ...


There were quiet ones ...


And there were small gourds with bright green and yellow patterns ...


There was this small submarine gourd ...

And this very pretty one too ...


After taking a bunch of pictures, we left with these two little beauties.