I was sure our window spider was long gone. This year the first hard freeze came nearly three weeks earlier than last year’s, and most orbweavers aren’t built to survive winter. They hatch in spring, grow up in summer, lay eggs in fall and die with the first freeze. Year after year, the pattern persists, and there is no use hoping it were otherwise.
“What’s a life, anyway?” Charlotte asks Wilbur in E.B. White’s classic children’s book about a friendship between a spider and a barnyard piglet. “We’re born, we live a little while, we die.” As befits a creature who lives by liquefying the insides of insects and then sipping them dry, Charlotte is unsentimental about the matter, even as she nears death herself. I am more like Wilbur than Charlotte. I cannot be so sanguine about the death of the spider who shares my own small ecosystem.
Last summer, she pitched her deadly little camp in the space between the glass and the screen of the window next to my husband’s side of the bed. I worried about her from the moment I spied her there back in July. As Annie Dillard’s bathroom spider did in “Holy the Firm,” our spider chose “a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic.” What flying or crawling thing would try to breach the screen in front of a closed window?
Last year’s late freeze seemed like a fluke, tying for the latest first freeze in Nashville’s history, but there’s really no way to say any kind of weather is a fluke anymore. November temperatures were still in the 70s while I packed for a trip a few weeks ago, but a hard freeze was predicted for the following night. I knew my canny companion in the window, who had been doing fine all summer and fall in her unlikely lair, would be gone by the time I got home again. After nightfall I took one last look at the mystery of her through the dirty glass.
When she meets Wilbur in Zuckerman’s barn, E.B. White’s spider introduces herself as Charlotte A. Cavatica. Her name includes her species I.D., for the barn spider’s binomial name is Araneus cavaticus. Our bedroom spider, by contrast, has been a puzzle to me from the beginning.
I have pored over field guides, including Sarah Rose’s entrancing “Spiders of North America,” which clocks in at 611 lavishly illustrated pages. I have clicked around on websites dedicated to Southeastern and Tennessee spiders. I have searched iNaturalist entries for spiders tagged to Nashville locations. Still, I cannot for the life of me determine the species of the spider who goes about her murderous work approximately one foot from my husband’s sleeping head. Who is she?
One reason I cannot identify her is that I cannot see her very well. It has been some years since anyone has washed our bedroom windows. Spiders are doing important work in this small habitat, and I don’t wish to disturb them or risk destroying their eggs sacs after they die. My husband would prefer to clean these windows, and all the other spidery windows of this house. I prefer spiders to cleanliness, and my preference carries the day because it is more humane and also requires no work. But dusty, rain-spotted glass does not yield the best possible view of a small creature who is attempting to hide.
It doesn’t matter whether I know her name. She will be who she is whether I can name her or not. The earth would be in much better shape if our species had not spent more than 100,000 years claiming dominion over every living thing we could slap a name on.
Nevertheless, I have spent months trying to answer this question because knowing this spider’s name might help me solve the mystery of her resemblance — and lack of resemblance — to a similar-size spider who took up a similar post last year and built a similar-looking little house for herself. Like the hidyhole made by last year’s spider, this year’s spider bower is also made of oak catkins tied together with spider silk and decorated sparingly with the exoskeletons of her insect victims.
When I found last year’s spider crouching in a little house of her own making, I was astonished. Nobody I asked about it had ever seen such a thing, either, including the naturalist and author Joanna Brichetto, who spends even more time studying household spiders than I do. We both thought we might be looking at some bit of creativity or problem-solving that’s unique to an individual spider.
But here was a new spider, a year later, doing something very close to the same thing! In the same window! “You won’t even believe this,” I texted Jo.
Her first thought, and mine, was that this was a daughter of last year’s spider. Same window. Same body type. Same striped legs. Most crucially, this spider had built herself a nearly identical hideaway.
She had not, however, built herself the same sort of web.
Last year’s orbweaver made a new web each night and ate it up again at dawn the next day. I rarely saw the web because I take care not to bother spiders while they work. It therefore took me some time to notice that this new spider was not building an orb-shaped web at all. This year’s web is multidimensional, but it’s not a cobweb spider’s web, like the one made by the spider she shares the window with. Jo sent me some pictures of a tangle-web spider in her own window — a spider who has also built a hiding place of detritus — but neither the spider nor the hiding place looks like the setup in the window on my husband’s side of the bed.
Two weeks after my trip, when I could finally bring myself to check the window again, I was astonished anew: The spider had survived the first hard freeze of the year after all. She has kept up her merciless work ever since.
I don’t know how. She has grown up between window glass and window screen, and now she is trapped there, unable to find shelter under fallen leaves or deep in a brush pile. The cobweb spider she shares the window with escapes into a crack in the windowsill mortar, but she herself is too large for such an option. Winter won’t hold off forever, and when it comes, she will be gone. This is how a rightly functioning ecosystem works.
I’ll miss her terribly anyway. She set up camp last summer, and we have lived together since, her with her tiny collection of insect legs and me with my peering eyes and puzzled mind. She is like no other spider I have ever known. E.B. White’s Charlotte was famously unique, but so is she, and so was last year’s spider, too. I’m beginning to think that maybe we all are.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of three books, most recently “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year.” Her first picture book, “The Weedy Garden,” will be published in February.
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