One September Saturday afternoon my husband and I were hauling rocks from a pile near my garden to the road bed by the pond. These were the same smooth pebbles that two years before we had moved from a pile near our house out to cover the walking paths of my garden. We have a long tradition of doing the same work time and again.
As sometimes it happens in southside Virginia the September air was still summertime warm. Frank and I worked in tandem shoveling the rocks onto the tractor lift. We wore shorts and tee shirts and Frank had begun to drip sweat from his brow. We were ready for a rest when our son Cabell called us to “Come see” what he had found in the backyard. As we walked over to where he was crouched in the grass he said, “Look at this spider.”
Actually in the previous two weeks we had looked at a lot of spiders. Cabell’s second grade class had finished the unit on frogs and toads several weeks before and since then we had switched from hopping after amphibians to peering at arachnids. We had identified sheet webs on the window sills and found a funnel web in the privet hedge. We had observed the spider that lived in the giant web outside his bedroom window catch bugs attracted by his light at night. We could identify the spider cephalothorax and we knew that the sticky silk was dispensed from the spider’s abdomen by the spinerets.
Today Cabell had a new spider lesson for us. We hunkered down beside him and followed the beam of his index finger to the tan and black spider making her way among the stalks of grass. At first she looked like an ordinary spider and then Cabell pointed out the cargo of tiny spiders she carted on her back. “See,” he said, “She’s a mother spider. Maybe she’s a wood spider or a jumping spider, but she’s carrying all of her babies. They are called spiderlings.”
I loved that word, spiderlings, and sure enough there must have been a hundred very tiny baby spiders clinging to the back of the mother spider. We watched her labor along and Cabell continued, “She’ll carry them until they get big enough to be on their own. Then one day they’ll leave her back and crawl to the top of a blade of grass. Then they’ll send out a string of silk.” Cabell swept his hand from the top of the grass out into the open air. “The wind will catch the strand and send them flying off. It’s called ballooning.” The three of us sat for a moment gazing over the field imagining the troops of spiderlings sailing off into the world away from the mother who had carried them on her back.
My husband looked at Cabell and asked, “Will you ever go ballooning away from us?”
“Nope, never,” Cabell replied with an honest heart and he grabbed his soccer ball and ran off to play leaving us there in the grass.
Frank and I stood and watched Cabell dribble the soccer ball in the far yard. I crossed my arms, squinted my eyes and leaned toward my husband, “I don’t believe him,” I grumbled. “He’ll be ballooning off before we know it. With no warning one day he’ll just leave. I say we stock up on scissors and any sign of a silk strand we snip it at the abdomen.”
“It’s a deal,” Frank nodded. “His cephalothorax is grounded.”