Warm Wind

"Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch," states the narrator of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.  Indeed, this is my favorite time of year as spring begins to swell to its fullest.  Nearly everything has been born and has hatched at this point, but I'm still enjoying every moment.  School is not yet out for the summer, so I still have every last minute of that delectable freedom ahead of me.
For the importance of this "almost there" moment, I have to quote A.A. Milne who wrote, “'Well,' said Pooh, 'what I like best -- ' and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.”  I try always to be celebrating and savoring this "moment just before."

I'd spent the weekend planning what I would write about the chicks John brought home yesterday and promptly settled into my "barn," if a building smaller than my small living room can be called a barn.  (I plan for it to be the calving shed next spring when Daisy gives birth to her first little one.)  However, I've yet to take a picture of the chicks, and I'm not exactly besotted with smelly critters that look more like chickens than chicks and have very few redeeming qualities at the moment.  So that's how I find myself preparing to write about something that would make nearly everyone else squirm: Charlotte's babies.  (Okay, I just called her Charlotte all last summer.  She didn't do anything as valiant as save an adorable pig's life, but she did keep me company on the porch -- and she was impressive.  Small house spiders may earn their right to stay alive, but only the largest most unusual outdoor spiders earn the right to be called Charlotte.)  I spent a fair amount of time on the internet trying to identify the particular type of spider Charlotte was, but I never found anything that adequately fit her description.  Regardless, she produced an egg sac by summer's end, just like that of her namesake.  I kept an eye on it all winter, and was amazed to find it looking very different one day this spring.  However, there were still no babies.  The first picture is how the egg sac has looked since it changed for the first time.

I would guess nothing else changed for at least 4 weeks, and then last week, suddenly, hundreds of babies. 

"Charlotte's babies were here at least," White writes.  I remember very clearly that in the novel the babies floated away on a warm wind.  Today's wind wasn't warm since we're expecting a storm that is supposed to bring snow to higher elevations, but there has been a wind nonetheless.  After spending over seven hours working in the yard and doing chores, I settled on the porch earlier this evening to finish reading Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.  As I have for the last few days, I glanced up to check on the babies.  Much of the group that had ventured the farthest away from the nest were descended from the porch roof on a long strand that floated in the breeze.  At one point I took a break from reading to look at the cat pen John has spent the day building, and when I returned, the long strand had disappeared.  The first of the babies had sailed away.

Only I would be sitting here with tears flowing down my cheeks as I read the final pages of Charlotte's Web.  I feel like Wilbur who felt "it was the best place to be [. . .] this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything."

I recently read an article about the best first lines of novels.  One of the those included was from Charlotte's Web:

"'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were
setting the table for breakfast."

The last line is a great one, too:

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

As I finish this post, I could wax poetic about how Daisy, like Wilbur, was also saved from an "untimely death."  She probably doesn't have a Charlotte to thank, but I, like Fern, now have my own young one to care for as a result, and as Fern described Wilbur, I must also say that Daisy's "absolutely perfect."