Day five: Spider kites

1:30 pm

Sat on the porch while the babe napped and the boy watched a little show.

Sun snuggled warm in my lap at first, then disappeared with clouds and a breeze.  A wasp flicked its way around a dark patch on the porch railing - a spot of bird poop?  An old water splash from the children?  Groomed its antennae, its face, then flew off.

Robins, bluebirds, red-winged blackbird, the chipping somebody, and our resident tree swallows.

Freddy, one of our two male Indian Runner ducks, rose up out of the water in a way I haven't seen him do before, and made a new, very un-duck-like noise while doing it.  I can't remember how it sounded now, just that it was small and sounded vaguely like a rodent.  The drakes left the water, groomed their feathers, their bills clack-clacking against the shafts of their beautiful, strong wing feathers.

I went in to nurse the little one back down to sleep, peeked in at the boy, then back out to sit longer.

Yellow dandelion heads and gray seed heads adorn the grass, while heavy, billowy clouds interspersed with cirrus looked down from above.

Black flies around my face.  White butterflies, yellow butterflies.  What kinds?  What plants do their young feed on?

Spiders on the porch railing!  A light brown one, 1/8 inch long and 3/4 inch wide, flat as a drawing.  Skittish, hiding between the boards whenever I brought my face near.  Another, pearly-black like an ant, and carrying its body almost above its legs the way an ant does.  Whenever I leaned in to watch it, it turned to face me, walked quickly towards me if I didn't retreat, and raised its body up comically high and pointed its abdomen toward the sky, like nothing I've ever seen before.  It quickly relaxed when I pulled away from it a bit, and continued along the railing.  It spotted another spider, an equally small, roundish person with tiny black dots in an arc on its yellow abdomen, like eyes.  The black spider approached it swiftly, abdomen pointed to the sky again, pounced on it for a moment, then hopped right back off and continued on its way as the yellow spider ambled away, apparently unharmed.

The black spider then raised its abdomen toward the sky and released a thread into the wind, standing still as the wind caught the thread, carried it first one direction, then another, held it taught, and then dropped it flat down beside the spider.  It had never occurred to me before that this could happen.  It was like watching a spider's kite go down.