This summer I fell in a kind of love with a huge spider that took up residence in my garden for the last few weeks of it. The spider spun a web that took over one garden chair, at the other end attaching itself to the top of an anaemic magnolia in a pot that I had bought in a frenzy of distraction. It wasn’t an ideal location for a web, but it was a beautiful one. In the unseasonal heat of September I sat outside and watched the spider, often, as I drank my coffee. The web became more elaborate. There were layers upon layer, repairs where wasps had blundered in, where leaves and dust had been caught. In the early morning it glittered with water. Sometimes the spider would be eating, clamped onto a silk-rolled fly, motionless. If I sat on the chair attached to the web by accident I would remember and leap up, apologising for the disturbance. But the spider was always regal, never bothered, mainly motionless. I like what you’ve done with the place I would say to her as I surveyed the latest additions to the web and I would laugh to nobody because mainly nobody was around, and because the chair was rusting and the weeds that I had pulled out of the flowerbeds during the same frenzy in which I had bought the magnolia were growing back more luxuriantly than ever. The sweat beaded at my hairline until I couldn’t bear it, and then I would finish my coffee and go inside.
I damaged the spider’s nest once, badly – forgetting about the chair once more and moving it into a different position. It was the only time the spider reacted to me. She scurried around the web in a panic, and I felt disproportionately terrible when I saw the gaping hole I had made in the web through my actions. In the last four weeks since she had set up home there I had grown to regard her with a slight but real affection – admiring her small routines, her consistency. There was nothing I could do, but the next day the web was fine, better even, repaired beyond repair. By that point it had been fixed and re-spun so many times that it had started to take on a dense, crystalline quality.
This time last year I started to knit a jumper, an undertaking I quickly realised I had underestimated. Still, it was coming along nicely, if imperfectly, until recently I realised that I had made a big mistake in shaping the armholes. The only thing to do was to unravel the jumper to an earlier point, but the knit was too complex, and all the other small mistakes I had made in the course of making the jumper, the ones that had not seemed so significant at the time – slipped stitches, lapses of attention – revealed themselves and how they’d been undermining the whole project, made the process of unravelling chaotic enough that I ended up with a half-undone jumper full of holes, a floor covered with sprawling knots of wool.
Maybe I could have adapted the pattern to suit, worked within the limitations of the mistake and resigned myself to an unpredictable, unwearable, outcome. Or I could have just paused and taken a more strategic approach to the unravelling. But it was hard to resist the impulse to fix it immediately, to pull at the wool until this very impatience made it unfixable, made it necessary to start from scratch. There’s a ferocious, horrible kind of satisfaction in seeing how quickly hours of work, days of work, can be undone; how fast something made with care, with love, can fall apart at your touch. Is it in the sheer abandonment of the destruction itself that the bitter pleasure of this lives, or in the relief of ruining something with your own hands before you can simply fail at it?
I felt very angry at myself once it became clear the jumper was irredeemable, once I’d stopped my trance-like pulling at the wool. It felt like exactly something I would do. Soon, though, I became resigned to starting it again. And then soon I even became excited about the opportunity to fix not just the armholes, but all the other mistakes too. I would create an even better jumper, I decided, a theoretical perfect jumper. Desire for the shiny and new, inability to tolerate imperfection, optimism? I haven’t decided. Ask me at the next unignorable mistake, the next unravelling, if I get there.
The spider abandoned her web during a fortnight where I was away. I came back and I missed her. The web left behind was ragged and thin. I kept an eye out, though, and sure enough I spotted another web, a few metres away, higher up and sturdier, strung between the branches of a rose bush. My friend who with me in the garden when I saw it asked How do you know it’s the same one? which was a fair question, but I saw the spider hanging out quietly in the centre of the new web the way she had done before, large and plush and stately. I was glad that she had found somewhere less precarious, that she had perhaps learned from her mistakes, even found it within herself to build something better.
This is beautiful.
There is something so wonderfully satisfying about unpicking something and watching yourself do a better job.