surprise

more about spiders! two days in a row!

i use these gloves for working. they keep me fairly safe from small scratches and scrapes. having gloves on is a reminder to be careful. just sliding a bare hand along a piece of wood is an opportunity for a splinter. i like to wear them when i'm weeding too; for protection from prickly weeds, but mainly protection for my skin. dirt is, as anyone who gardens knows, very hard on skin. the downside of gloves, for me, is heat. i break a sweat easily, so i want as much bare skin as i can manage. i have that north european skin, thin with age, freckled, easily bruised, subject to skin cancer or other less dangerous bumps. i need to wear a hat for sun shading, but wow, does that make my head hot.

here's the backstory behind the picture of a spider robin posted yesterday, captioned so well with a haiku that hinted at a bigger tale. i was pulling on my gloves as i was walking out the door to do something that wanted gloves. i felt something in the thumb of my right glove. not a pebble. softer. i pictured a bit of the cedar bark mulch covering much of our place. a bit of bark. i often find small bits of various grit in my gloves and i'll admit that if it's a small bit i ignore it and just work on. i decided, and all of this perception and deciding was almost subconscious, barely registering in my thoughts about weeding or shingling or whatever it was i had in mind to do, that this bit of stuff was too much at the tip of my thumb inside the glove. so i pulled off the glove and shook it out, expecting a bit of bark, or something of that sort, to fall out. imagine my surprise, he said in a cliche, when a live spider fell out!

it was a frisky spider, not holding still for portraiture, perhaps annoyed or panicked at being first jostled and shoved in its hidey hole and then shaken out to a wide open space with no refuge in sight. we didn't get a clearly focussed picture, but you can see quite a bit of detail of its body. i did flip it over and was relieved that it had no red hourglass on its underside. even though it didn't bite me. could have happened. we put it outside. still alive.

a day later i was moving stuff in our garage and found what looked to me to be the same sort of spider. this one sat quite patiently for me to get a perfectly focussed picture. i almost did. aren't those rug fibers in perfect focus.

enjoy your weekend. see ya monday.