I like what you've done with the place

Weaving and repair

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.