Spider Lore

"Killing a spider will bring rain," so my father often said, his steel-toed boots crushing scampering bodies into dark smudges of tangled legs while my mother simply shooed the scuttling creatures out the back door or through an open window. "It will rain some other way," she said, shaking her head.

A friend of animals, my mother was sure the spider's place in the world was not to be squashed. "A flying spider brings good luck," she added, looking at me.

Even at six, I was skeptical, frowning at her.

She tried again. "It was a spider that spun a web across the bed of Baby Jesus." She further explained that its tiny work of art was a delicate effort to protect the baby from the world. It was a story, I noticed, that was absent from the pages of the New Testament, and certainly, the spider was an animal missing from all the manger scenes I had ever seen.

________

In his 1963 book titled Folklore of American Weather, author Eric Sloane reviews common bits of wildlife folklore and their truthfulness. For instance, Sloane claims that bees are often good weather forecasters, and that if bees stay close to the hive, rain is close by. On the other hand, just because squirrels store a lot of nuts does not mean that a hard winter is coming.

It also appears that spiders are not good predictors of weather. According to Sloane, a bit of lore that says, "When spiders forsake their webs one day, look for rain the next" simply is not true. This sentiment is echoed in The Weather Companion, published much later, in which author Gary Lockhart explains, "Dr. Henry McCook, the American spider expert, kept spiders for six years and observed their weather senses."

McCook's conclusion? Spiders have no predictive powers. They cannot forecast the weather or predict the future.

________

Signs of the dry spell were everywhere. It was 1977, and while it may not have been declared an official drought in the record books, everything felt dry. Grass in our front lawn scratched my feet and maple tree leaves drooped into withering frowns. Tiny clover blossoms turned brown, and dandelions wilted in the hot sun. Dust flew off the streets and hovered -- uncertainly -- in the air, a permanent cloud around us. Even though we lived in rural Pennsylvania, I was sure I would see tumbleweeds rolling down our streets at any moment. It was so dry that even the spider's web outside my bedroom window failed to catch any droplets of morning dew.

My mother, however, seemed oblivious to the heat. She was on a mission. I was going to learn how to tie my shoes.

For over a year, I had struggled with this mysterious task.

My older brothers had tried, with the same undying patience that was exhibited when they taught me how to print my name, to teach me the process: make bunny ears with the laces and cross the "ears" into knots.

Somehow, my bunny ears always came out in a mess of tangles with no resemblance to anything that was supposed to tether my shoes to my feet. Instead, they looked like the tumbleweeds I half expected to see on our drought-dry and dusty streets.

So, I tried and I tried and I failed, and then I found my own solutions to the problem: get someone else to tie my shoes.

Or better yet, once the weather got warm, I kicked off my shoes and ran around in my bare feet until my soles grew hard from contact with cement and sharp roadside gravel.

Months before, the school nurse had told my mother that I had "weak fingers" and that was why I couldn't tie my shoes. "Uncoordinated" was what my mother said to my father when she thought I couldn't hear her. "A klutz," joked my brothers when they were sure that I could.

Watching my fingers struggle as I tried to tie my shoelaces, my mother ignored the drought, even as my father fought to save our vegetable garden from the relentless heat...