Woven Threads of Memory

As a child, I was a tomboy. I was a fast runner and could outrun any boy in a game of tag. I wasn’t afraid of insects.  I loved to dig around for worms, put them on hooks, and fish with the neighborhood boys. We caught fish with fancy names. We caught catfish and blue gills, sunnies, bullheads, and chubbies. Local fish names, I’m sure.

I had a buddy named Johnny Jo. He had a lisp like me. The way he called out my childhood name, Francy, warmed my heart, “Hey Franthy! Leth go fishing! The Thouthern Bellieth are jumpin’.” That would be Southern Bellies he was referring to, but you’d only know that “if you was born and raised in Indiana”.  Johnny Jo lived in a Split-Level House across the creek from me. His Ma was Cherokee. She was slender, tall, wore bell bottom blue jeans, perfectly frayed at the hem. With her glorious jeans, she wore a white t-shirt and a black leather jacket. She wore her black silky hair long, past her slim waist..and she wore moccasins! None of the other mothers in my neighborhood looked like her or dressed like her. She was beautiful.  I was always tongue-tied in her presence.

One day, I went over to Johnny Jo’s house and knocked on his door. His Ma answered the door and told me to wait while she fetched Johnny Jo.  Not five minutes had gone by and down the stairs he ran, fishing pole in hand, and off we went to find a creek to fish.

Well, imagine, if you will, the thick of summer in Indiana: hot and humid, milkweed and cattails, cicada songs overwhelming and deafening.  Johnny Jo and I find ourselves in a world of trails among the marshes and the cattails. We are small children and the cattails are high, looming over our heads, cattails like cigars waiting to be smoked. And banana spiders spin their webs across the path. The spiders are enormous, their bellies yellow.  Their bodies are some two inches long and their legs longer. Johnny Jo tells me that the lady banana spider eats the man banana spider after he helps her make her eggs turn into baby spiders. Johnny Jo is full of stories like this. As a child, I wonder how on earth he comes up with such tales!  We carry sticks to break the banana spiders’ enormous webs so we can proceed forward on our way to fish.

I must have been absorbed in one of Johnny Jo’s stories when suddenly a banana spider jumped on me and grabbed a hold of the skin on my wrist and bit me. Up until then, I had no fear of spiders. But this spider had a grip on me and I could not get it off me. My whole arm was stinging with the pain of the bite. I started screaming and Johnny Jo helped me get back home. Somewhere along the way, he pulled the spider off me and onward we went, me howling, Johnny Jo on a mission to get me to my mom.

When we got to my house, my mom saw my swollen wrist and grabbed an onion! She sliced it in half, put it against my wrist and tied the onion in place. The look on Johnny Jo’s face was priceless. He must have gone home to report the onion incident to his Ma because the next time I saw her, she had many questions for me about the sting, how it felt, and did the onion trick really work?

Well, yeah it did! A little Sicilian folk remedy from my mom to you.

Rick gave me permission to share this spider haiku with you:

walked right through it—

the web a spider took hours 

to weave

-Rick Clark

Looking through the prism of the web filaments

I am still not afraid of spiders. I don’t want them on me and I don’t want them in my house, but I think their webs are brilliant and a mystery of nature. And yes, everything Johnny Jo told me back when we were kids rang true. Female banana spiders eat the male after they mate!

Who knew a web could capture squares of light and cast rainbows of colors?

Rick wrote this great haiku and gave me permission to include it here:

Spider Webs Up Close, filaments catch the light

Enjoy these photos of webs! They are quite magical.

Threads of the spider web catch sunlight