I wrote this piece in October 2022, but I made a few additions and changes as more memories have come up in a re-read. Half a year after seeing the orb weaver in the window that prompted me to write this story, we were able to purchase this property through the help of community. Since I have no intention of moving ever again, this is, in fact, now home.
Fall is spider season. We see more of them now since the males are out looking for mates before the winter approaches and their lives come to an end, and the females are out on their webs fattening up to make babies. This year is turning out to be our biggest spider season yet, partially due to the wet spring and summer weather that created a huge increase in insects (and therefore food), and partly because we’ve changed the landscape here, which has created a lot more habitat for them to expand into.
I’m happy to see the spiders out doing the good work, catching flies and mosquitos for us. We went through a bad point this summer when the mosquitos were Northern Ontario bad (if you know, you know) and it would have been worse if not for the spider population. We welcome our spider overlords and there’s even one that lives tucked inside our passenger side mirror and comes on short trips with us to the grocery and home again. Spiders and their artfully constructed webs are a welcome sight in the garden, and I look forward to the diversity of species that will find their home here alongside us as the garden expands.
The above photo and following words are from October 13, 2022. I have since made additions and edits.
In the early 80s, when I was a kid, my stepfather took us a couple of road trips to western Ontario to visit his maternal relations. His whole family were Bible thumping evangelicals, and that’s how I was raised. I went to Sunday school, weekly Bible club, and a couple of times to a hardcore Christian camp down in New York State that I would describe as cultish. We did sleepovers at the church, and at The Buffalo Christian Center, a religious recreational facility that featured both Christian roller skating AND a Pilgrim’s Progress mini putt in the basement. All of this was confusing given that my parents were hard partiers who drank alcohol, did drugs and listened to heavy metal music (and not the Christian metal kind). My mother had a large pink and black mohawk that was both phenomenal and frightening when she wore it up, and my stepfather did a short stint in prison for dealing weed.
When we went out west to visit the extended relations, we stayed at our great grandmother’s in a tiny, one-street town called Merlin. She lived in a 50s or 60s ranch style bungalow. There were shelves full of mushy old peaches in the basement, and her water, which came up through the taps from a well, tasted funny and was often rust coloured. We ate a lot of toasted white bread there and tried not to drink the water. The living room, which was kept impeccably clean and perfectly appointed was for looking at—nobody ever sat in that room and god forbid you should eat in there. It was just not done. It was the sort of place that made you feel like hymnal music was constantly playing at a low hum in the background, and while I suppose that’s possible, I don’t believe there was. My brother and I found a rifle in the kids bedroom closet, a discovery that was so shocking to us city-dwellers (especially as Canadians) that we still marvel about it to this day.
The older folk of this western branch of the family were Pentecostal, which is even more intense than the gospel church we attended. Sternness, and a stiff, pursed lip that is always at the ready to scold and judge is their default. They do not dance or wear jewelry. They do not abide by frivolity of any type. They had religion on another level and their cold, passionless affect unnerved me.
While visiting out west, we would do a handful of day trips to far flung towns to visit my stepfather’s distant relatives. The highlight was always a visit to Boblo Island, an old amusement park that was shut down in the 90s. I think it’s condos now. Back then you took a 5 minute ferry ride from the mainland at Amherstburg, and there was another, much larger boat that brought people in all the way from Detroit. The singular, most unforgettable thing about Boblo was the Devil’s Hole, a ride that was essentially a large cylinder of sorts. From the outside it looked like a big box, with painted flames to play up the hell theme. You entered through a door and stood flat against the wall. The door would close and the ride would start spinning, slowly at first, then moving faster and faster in a long, terrifying build up. In time, you could feel your limbs, your skin, and even your cheeks being sucked against the wall until eventually the floor dropped and you found yourself held up by nothing but centrifugal force. It was wild to look down and see the floor several feet below. I was fearless back then, or at least eager to prove it, and went on that ride many times, but I never tried to position my body upside down as some people did.
They had a replica at Fantasy Island, an amusement park in Grand Island, New York and I went on it there too. The worst part about the ride was that people could climb up a staircase to a viewing platform and look down into the barrel, so there were always spectators heckling your decent into hell. Inversely, as a spectator, you could watch the riders and catch a glimpse of your own future hell ride, which made it all the more terrifying.
I remember one time a girl a bit older than me started screaming as soon as the ride began to spin. She screamed louder and louder as the spinning increased, which turned into a wailing, frantic, begging to be let out.
“I want off! Pleeeeease let me offfffff!”
Around the point where the floor should have begun to drop, they slowed down and stopped the ride. She got out, sobbing, her eyes full of tears and her face frozen in abject fear. And then we had to go through the whole build up AGAIN. Of course, watching this drama unfold gave me bragging rights for being tough enough to brave a ride that made an older kid cry.
All of this strikes me now as somehow ironic, between the religion and the theme of the ride, and the fact that I’ve suffered from severe vertigo on and off since I was 16. Now, with chronic illness, I am perpetually in some state of dizziness, often for days, months, and whole years (I’m dizzy right now as I write this), so it’s hard to imagine that I once enjoyed spinning at a high speed ON PURPOSE.
One of the extended relatives we stopped to visit on the way to Boblo Island was an elderly great aunt who lived alone in an old farmhouse in tobacco and tomato country. These crops are mostly gone now and the next big business is legalized cannabis (also ironic), but in the early 80s, we drove past fields upon fields of gigantic tobacco leaves while my stepfather went on and on about the lusciousness of the tomatoes of his youth. “Biggest, most delicious field tomatoes you’ll ever see,” is how they were described, and the area even boasted a tomato ketchup factory and a kitschy giant tomato tourist stop. He’d always buy a small bushel on the trip, only to take them home and enjoy them, “gourmet-like,” cooked to within an inch of their life in a sloppy pot of Kraft dinner from the box with slices of boiled Maple Lodge chicken wieners (when he was being extra fancy). The rest would sit unused and one time, my mother tried to can the extras, which is not difficult to learn, but also not something you do as an afterthought. The jars went bad. We could have died, and thinking on it further, death by poorly canned tomatoes in one of his awful noodle and powdered cheese concoctions would have been a particularly unfortunate way to go. As an adult, I have canned many things, particularly tomatoes. Haven’t killed anyone yet (that I know of).
The aunt, an elderly widow, was pale and old, with long thin fingers, and deep, sagging wrinkles and skin. In the eyes of kid me, she was impossibly old, the house was old, and so were its contents. Everything was in fact quite old, but in impeccable, practically unused condition. The furniture, the radio, the telephone, the dishes. Everything. It was as though time had stopped on that farm circa 1930s-40s, and we had walked into a museum of it nearly a half century on. I’d never seen anything like it except in horror movies about witches and the supernatural. The visit made me uneasy, like being inside an M. Night Shyamalan film with a surprise ending wherein it is revealed that the main character was really a ghost all along.
A memory I will never forget is going into the kitchen alone to get a drink of water. As I stood with a glass under the tap, I looked out and saw the biggest, fattest spider on a massive web that stretched the width and height of the window. Of course, I didn’t know about country spiders, having grown up in a virtually lifeless townhouse complex. This old lady, living in a creepy old house surrounded by old stuff with a gigantic spider web in the kitchen window met all the hallmarks of a fairytale witch. I couldn’t wait to get out of that house and I’m not sure which I felt more proud of having survived: the Devil’s Hole or the old aunt’s witch house.
Years later, well into my adult life, I found myself living in an old house with giant cross weaver orb spiders spinning webs in the window. I grew plants and foraged for ingredients to make strange brews and herbal medicines. I filled the house with old things found in junk shops and thrift stores. I named the spiders that lived in the window and fed them during the winter to help them live as long as possible. If anyone was a witch, it was me.
And that’s a good thing.
Now I’m living in another house in a small town that is countryside adjacent. I have long greying, baby crone hair. I still have all my weird old junk, but the house is a midcentury bungalow and not an older farmhouse. I’m past 50 and the last few years of big life stressors and illness have aged me considerably, and there is skin that is beginning to crinkle and sag. I’ve been here over a year now and there are still moments when I look around and say out loud, “Really, I live here now? How did that happen?”
Tonight, as I stood at the kitchen sink washing my hands, I looked out at the yard that looks like the countryside, but isn’t. Not exactly. But close. Dangling in the window was a big fat orb weaver spider and I was instantly reminded of great aunt what’s-her-name of the old house with the old stuff and the kitchen spider. It felt like a sign. I don’t know what it means exactly. She and I were not related by blood. We have almost nothing in common. She would be horrified to be thought of as a witch because that’s devil business. I claim my witchiness proudly. Still, something felt full circle about it all. Like an omen that this is home. This is where I am supposed to be.
Hahaha, I love this reflection, and have been reflecting on my own life these days too, where I’ve ended up, how my body looks and feels.
I also protect the spiders and the big webs, and the house centipedes, I consider them all helpers.
Your writing is magical and I love your reflections on growing up and nature. Thank you for sharing your gift with us.