“Experience is never limited and it is never complete: it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue”.
~Henry James
Friday at my job, as it is at many offices, is “casual Friday.” To me, that meant that I would wear leggings under a skirt with a sweater. It felt casual. To me. I guess not to my co-worker and friend, L. She came up to me as I was typing away and asked, “Have you always been so…prissy?” And it sort of took me aback. Me, prissy?
Do I wear dresses? All the time? Yes. Absolutely. Except when I am wearing a skirt. But since I have worn dresses while hiking, while breaking the neck off a turkey carcass and pulling his little turkey guts out, while on my hands and knees scrubbing a rooftop clean, while carrying a bleeding child home from the park, and a zillion other situations, I didn’t really think that this made me “prissy”. I thought it made me the type of girl who could eat 5 plates at the Chinese buffet without have to worry about my jeans digging into my stomach. I looked at my co-worker with a quizzical eye and wondered why this was a question. Didn’t she know me?
It sort of reminds me of my favorite bit of Christmas. You see, my mother is German and our tree was always very staunchly “German”. When we had lived in Germany, my mother had collected many beautiful things that you simply could not find in America, things like a gorgeous wax angel with luminous skin and bright eyes, delicate candle holders, and most importantly, the tale of the Christmas Spider.
You’ve never heard of the Christmas Spider? Well, that is the whole reason you have tinsel on your tree. Yes, my mother, who is not a tacky woman, let me start off by saying, would delicately swath our tree in tinsel as the final touch before we set the angel atop. And she would always tell me the story of the spider as she did so. You see, when all the other creatures came to see the baby Jesus in that manger, they all brought what they had to share. Wool to keep him warm, milk to keep him fed, you know the tale. And when the spider came, the animals did not know what she could share. And so she spun. She spun her delicate web here and there and made intricate patterns that she hung from the plain wooden rafters. As the northern star shone down, light reflected off her beautiful webbing and caused the whole manager to glow and shimmer and look much more beautiful than it had been before.
I thought of this story as I walked to work today because I saw spider’s web, strung up in a strange alcove of a building where the spotlights were set up. One spot light was just right underneath this web, where the spider sat in the center, causing the whole web to look golden. It really stood out to me and made me remember the story and how much I do love spiders just because of that childhood memory. And yes, that is sort of the point. Because my mother told me that tale over and over again, because we have delicate spider ornaments tucked away on our tree right beside Santa’s and snowflake encrusted bulbs, whenever I see a spider, I smile. It’s changed my whole outlook on how I view them. I think to myself, pretty web and thanks for eating the icky bugs that try to crawl in my house. And sometimes I have to sweep them outside, but I never squish them with a shoe or a book.
I think that when people do kill spiders it’s because they don’t really know them and every time I hear someone make a statement about me and my dresses, good or bad, I feel like they don’t really know me. It’s true, sometimes people are extra kind to me because of my dresses. And sometimes they are less than kind, acting as though I am offering up an excuse of incapability to anyone looking at me.
I think it’s both. I glamorize the spider and her lovely little web, but I am fully aware and incredibly thankful that she’s also using that web to trap the bugs that I do not like and keeping them away from my house. I like that she’s strong and willful and protective and that she did not build an ugly little weapon to do it all with, she did it with a flair for design that could not be learned in a decade at Parson’s.
