Photo from Google
All summer cellar spider hung
in web across the desktop screen,
though web grew dusty, faithfully
patrolled where fungus gnats had been.
In web across the desktop screen
she did no harm, perhaps some good.
Her smaller mate thrice came and went.
She left the office, placed each brood.
Though web grew dusty, faithfully
she monitored the host of gnats
that soiled the screen and pestered me.
Up to the morning of first frost
patrolled where fungus gnats had been.
Went out to lay eggs. Came not back.
A young one, legs two-thirds as long,
assumes her place, walks in her track.
Notes
Two prompts went into this exercise: https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2026/11/friday-writings-253-starting-from.html prompted participants to revisit or rewrite a previous poem, and http://dversepoets.com/2026/11/12/mtb-returning-to-fours/ invited us to write in a form called the retourne.
Retournes repeat whole lines, not rhymes, and don't have to have a rhyme scheme at all; this one insisted. The first three stanzas have imperfect rhymes, consonances, and the last stanza has a perfect rhyme. A poem is a retourne if it has four stanzas, four lines each, and if lines 2, 3, and 4 are repeated in the same order as lines 5, 9, and 13. Each line of a retourne has eight syllables.
A few weeks ago I wrote a longer poem in a more flexible form about the cellar spiders who took up residence in the office last summer.
One reader commented that she didn't like spiders. That's unfortunate, especially because cellar spiders are completely harmless. Their litle feet don't even tickle in that way most humans loathe so much. They like to share our homes in order to protect us from real nuisance creatures--including some spiders that are bigger than they are!
Cellar spiders are delicate little things, most likely to survive in little-used corners of houses; their favorite food is the fungus gnats that help us, when young, by eating mold and mildew, and then annoy us, as adults, by flying into our faces. Cellar spiders are not able to bite or scratch humans. Not that they want to; they can't eat warm-blooded animals. They usually avoid contact but, if they do approach us, they're trying to protect us from pests.
Cellar spiders are considered to belong to the same family as daddy-long-legs. In fact some people call them daddy-long-legs and call the big outdoor animals properly called that granddaddy-long-legs. Both species have relatively small bodies balanced on extremely long, thin legs and sometimes bounce or sway on their legs a bit. However, daddy-long-legs don't make webs, and cellar spiders do. The reason why cellar spiders are considered nuisances is that they can make great quantities of dusty, messy webs.
I was on the side of the cellar spider who spun a web from a reference book across about a third of the desktop computer screen, in hopes of catching gnats, which are attracted to light in the evening and leave little flyspecks on screens or windows. I enjoyed watching her slowly learn that she could not actually catch pixels, although she was fascinated by them, and learn to recognize the difference in the way pixels, gnats, and moths move.
From time to time she entertained a cellar spider a bit smaller than she was. I don't know whether this was one faithful mate who came back to her, or three different ones; in any case he seemed to help remove very dusty threads and add new ones to her web, and each time they went off somewhere to be alone together for a day or so, then came back, but the male didn't stay long. Male body size was constant; the female's body expanded and contracted, presumably reflecting meals, or egg development and placement, or both.
One evening, while the resident cellar spider was not at her web, a tiny spiderling passed by, spinning a long thread from ceiling to floor, then disappearing...presumably heading for the cellar where it belonged.
The last day the cellar spider went out was the day before the first frost. Well, I didn't see frost at the Cat Sanctuary, but many people did; the next day counted as the day of the first frost. I looked for Mrs. Spider and haven't seen her since. Instead, the next day, her web was occupied by a spider who looks smaller than either Mr. Spider or Mrs. Spider was, but who already knows it can't eat pixels. Maybe the spiderling was lurking behind the baseboard, eating fungus gnats, and waiting to take over Mrs. Spider's web, all through the last weeks of this extended summer.
I've seen that some of the narrow-waisted wasps, who are thought to be solitary, actually live as couples (though they are different sizes). Maybe the cellar spiders had some sort of family life, too. We used to think herons were solitary; now we know they like to live and travel in big noisy messy families, if they can. It doesn't take a lot of brain to have a sense of family.
Cellar spiders lay several eggs in a little case. The case is smaller than humans would ever notice if not looking for it, though alarmingly large relative to the size of the spider. When the spiderlings hatch and unpack themselves there seems no way they could ever fit into the case. It seems big enough to hold one or two spiderlings once their legs unfold; it actually holds two or three dozen. I don't know how long it takes spiders to reach their full size, whether the one now using Mrs. Spider's web hatched in October, or whether it will grow bigger than it currently is.
The longer poem I'd written about the spiders, and shared with the Poets & Storytellers, I was told exceeded their word count limit. Poets & Storytellers came to say they liked it but then I was notified that the link couldn't stay on their site. Did I want to cut down that poem and repost it? I did not. I thought it'd be interesting to write a shorter update reporting just how long Mrs. Spider stayed on the computer screen, and what became of her, about this time of year. So the prompt to revise and revisit came at a convenient time.
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