wrap it up

“October” was derived, I’m certain, from some ancient word that meant “big spiders.” Around here, those monsters bounce in loose, end-of-season webs hung with egg cases and wait for one last summer bug to suck the life out of or death by winter, whichever comes first. The breeze that rocks them is cool, hinting at damp; summer’s oven wind, the fire-spreader, is gone, the potential baby spiders safe from being incinerated until spring. Outside my office window, the elm’s leaves are changing from vibrant green to sick yellow; the finches will come back for those few days when the color camouflage is perfect, before there is nothing left but determined gestating spider wads hanging from bare branches.

Fall is a manic time in the garden. I hurry to root out the old and buy new before the growers run out of things to sell and close down for the holidays and all of January, before the rains we’ve been promised might actually come for the first time in an entire thirsty year. My left bionic hip is still not strong enough for me to drive a spade into the ground with my boot, so I direct my helpers, Luis and Felix, by gesturing at tired shrubs and broken sprinkler heads with my cane. Tapping around the beds and along the flagstone paths, marking things for execution, I find sticky webs and secreted eggs, covered in fuzz like tiny tennis balls, in odd places:  the hole-side of a gate latch (stuffed so full the damn thing won’t click shut), inside an upended, empty pot, and strung eye-high across my path between nearly every tree and the closest downspout. I swing my cane like a scythe, breaking the silk free before it wraps around my head. The strands glue themselves to the cane shaft, and soon I am dragging nests behind me like a dress train made of dirty gossamer and awkward pompoms.

Many years ago I drove to Carmel in October, pulling up into the steep driveway at what we called The Second San Luis House just before midnight. I don’t remember what the bad news was — and the season doesn’t correspond with what I know were the milestones of my father’s physical decline and eventual death — only that there was some, that I took a deep breath before I opened the car door and got out of the driver’s seat with the taste of dread in my mouth. Marge had forgotten to turn on any outside lights; the living room floated — a small, homely gold — above a deep of unbroken black:  oaks and conifers, the quiet hillside, the starless, moonless sky. I felt my way across the asphalt and up the flagstone steps with my feet acting like a blind person’s cane, nudging the next riser, feeling for hard surfaces, avoiding slippery drifts of pine needles. Dense hedges of prickly ceanothus and hollies lined the stair and the patio at the top, behind the house, waiting to snag your sweater or scratch any skin that got close. Having made it to the house without injury, I opened the unlocked kitchen door and went in, softly calling “yoo-hoo.”

My memory is gappy after that. I know Dad was sleeping and we talked about him without him, but quietly. Hannah, their yellow lab, ambled out from her bed next to his to be polite and say hello but without any of her usual body-wagging enthusiasm. Whatever was wrong — and something clearly was; I just can’t remember what — wasn’t horrible, just sad and inevitable. We sat and talked, hugged and cried a little, warm by the fire and a ticking clock. After a while we decided whatever else needed saying could wait until morning and I should get my bag out of the car. Marge said, “Oh, shoot. I didn’t turn on the lights for you. I’m so sorry. Here, let me get the switch.” The floods set in the eaves of the house, front and back, and all along the driveway came on, bright as a sports stadium for a night game. I grabbed her forearm and said, “Oh, god. Look.”

Outside the front door and along the deck, two stories above the descending hillside, were a couple dozen huge native shrubs, closely planted, curving away to the far end of the house and then around to the back patio, merging with the shorter, stabbier plants that lined the steps I had climbed in the dark. Gigantic spider webs, each five feet in diameter, looking for all the world like ropy crocheted blankets, covered the bushes from top to bottom. They reflected the artificial light, glowing, silver as tinsel. In the middle of each web was a big dark spider, clinging and awake, its knuckled legs carefully feeling for the twang of a catch in the night. The Carmel damp had hung droplets of water on the strands, glittering against the leaves’ dull dark green. Ground fog filled the space between tree trunks and shrubs behind the web wall all the way down to the street, covering my car and the driveway. We turned and looked out the back windows - the spiders and their spun creations surrounded the house on all sides; it was a gapless spider wall, a web fortress.

I said, “I can’t believe I walked through that and didn’t know. I’m not going out there 'til morning, and maybe not even then. Maybe we can be helicoptered out. Can I borrow a nightgown?” Marge, a country woman who usually sniffed at my city folk ways, nodded without comment and went to get one.

I walked back to the front to watch the fairy tale spiders riding in identical loopy, swaying homes that looked like rotten sails on weird ships. A thin wind wobbled them once, twice; the spiders wiggled and resettled. I shivered. Then a sharp, hard gust snapped through the branches from behind, and all the little water droplets flew out of the webs at once, arcing, to shatter, suddenly light- and lifeless, on the deck, ten thousand spider tears.