"Terrific", "Radiant", "Humble"

"Some Pig" After quoting E. B. White a couple times the last few weeks, I decided I should re-read "Char-lotte's Web". I have long admired both the book and the movie, but I knew I had forgotten much of it.
This morning as I read, "On foggy mornings, Charlotte's web was truly a thing of beauty. This morning each thin strand was decorated with dozens of tiny beads of water. The web glistened in the light and made a pattern of loveliness and mystery, like a delicate veil," I noted this lovely spider's web outside my own window.


Most spider webs aren't easy to photograph. The exception is this web made by the Funnel Web Grass Spider. With the dew still upon it, it is easy to understand the name given its builder.












Thinking about spiders took me back to my earliest recollections of them - how deathly afraid Mom was of them and how her fear transferred to me as a child. There were huge, hairy spiders in the basement that Mom called "Wolf Spiders". When she saw one she would scream and find something to kill it.
I never tried to kill them. I ran up the basement stairs screaming and bawling. I did that every time I saw one for a number of years. Then, one day, I just decided not to be so afraid of them any longer. I still didn't like them, I just no longer reacted so dramatically to seeing one.



There was another large spider we saw quite often - "The Yellow and Black Garden Spider". True to its name, we generally found them in the garden. They spun lovely webs and usually were sitting right in the middle of them.
For some reason, Mom didn't mind these spiders. Probably because she knew they were good for the garden - eating aphids and grasshoppers which kept them from eating our vegetable crops. We learned to leave them and their webs alone, only ever destroying a web accidentally when picking tomatoes.



You would think if Mom was going to be afraid of anything, it would be snakes. But just as she knew the garden spiders were beneficial, so she knew garter snakes were valuable. She would pick them up to show them to us, telling us not to be afraid. So, I wasn't. They still startled me when I saw them unexpectedly and they moved suddenly, but I didn't fear them.

"Charlotte's Web" is a Newbery Honor Book published in 1952. Its lessons of loyalty and friendship are as essential today as they were sixty years ago - maybe more so.