"Come Back. It's Time."

The zipper spiders have arrived! Also known as a yellow spider, banana spider, and writer spider, this spider is officially called an Argiope aurantia. Although enormous and sort of scary looking, argiopes won't bother you (or the children who love to observe them). In fact, they pretty much just hang out there in their very cool, large webs with the zig-zag through it and catch bugs, unless they are hiding by a leaf in the heat of the day.

Once they appear in my garden, always at this time of the year, I spend far too much time out there photographing them from every angle. So I may start inundating you with Daily Argiope photos! Frankly, I think the purpose, for me, of the argiope's arrival is to get me back out in the garden, observing, weeding, connecting on a daily basis, after a few months of doing the bare minimum because of the heat. The argiope is nature's way of saying, "Come back. It's time."

Even now, in the dark of morning, I feel anxious to see my argiope. She (the big ones are females) made her web between a window screen and a lavender bush, right on the edge of the herb garden bed that butts up to my house. In other words, when I open my back kitchen door, there she is. I imagine, perhaps, deep inside, that one day I'm going to walk out there and see that, instead of a zipper, she has written me a message. Unlike Charlotte from Charlotte's Web, who wrote "Some pig," the words Wilbur needed to hear, I wonder what words my argiope will write me? What words do I need to hear?

E.B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web, wrote in a letter to a young fan:

In real life, a spider doesn't spin words in her web . . . But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination. And although my stories are imaginary, I like to think that there is some truth in them, too—truth about the way people and animals feel and think and act.

"Come Back. It's Time."