Bethanie's Brain

Alas! Jack the Spider Mama is no more. She departed our living room window during a violent storm in early November, washed away, I fear, by the pounding rain which was hitting that side of the house pretty much horizontally. She did not, however, leave us without performing one final miracle. Here is the story of her final days. While it never really gets cold this far south of the M-DL* (the natives will tell you it does, the rest of us know better), we do get the occasional heavy frost. I had been watching Jack closely over the previous few days, because nighttime temperatures were dropping into frost territory (even though it was still 80 and 90 during the day - no joke - but that’s another story), and I thought she might be on her way out. She seemed sluggish, lethargic and she had been hanging around her first miracle (the egg sack) and not rebuilding her web. I assumed the approaching cold and the fact that there weren’t so many bugs to eat anymore were responsible. As evidence ...