Greetings from a spider

There is wonder in a spider’s web, drenched in the fog of early morn; an untouched quiet of heavy dew drifting off the lake and now resting on our island. Then, in a breakthrough, the sun throws light over tall grass, onto high branches, over windrows close and far away.

Nearby, a leopard frog stirs in the damp grass; a garter snake finds its way into the rust of deadwood. My boots are drenched in heavy dew, and everywhere are caterpillar nests. Ghost-like, they hover here and there in the mulberry and ash like a corridor in a circus house of horrors.

I have many times sat and taken in the tapestry art of the spider. Now back-lit by the dawn and painted with dew, I watch as, patiently as an inshore dory-man, the spider awaits the tingle of its web; maybe spider has landed the big one; maybe it is the one that got away; spider’s shore lunch; its daily bread.

It is these quiet moments on the sidelines that can amuse, catch our imagination. The trick, I figure, is to adopt the stillness and patience of the spider, bring the worldly rush to halt once in a while, seize a moment of nature’s play to help ground us through the day.

And then at eventide, the air show of the dragon and damsel fly begins. Raised after two years of incubation, now careening after airborne prey—I pray it is mosquitoes— through the carefree light of dusk they land, here and there and upon my shoulder. They are the generations, the lineage from prehistoric times.

And so, now on the road from Demorestville, past Big Island and through Northport, I muse in the blessed calm of early morning. Bordered by lake and open meadows, I feel the oldness of the land here. The highway will take me over the bridge and through Tyendinaga and out to the whine of rubber on asphalt; out to the 401.

I am headed into the rising sun, eastbound to the nation’s capital, a return visit to offer company and support to the centenarian scientist, my dad, as he adjusts to a new passage in the veteran’s wing of the Perley Rideau Centre in Ottawa. Passages in life often call on hidden resolve to meet the challenge. We have it in us.

For me, Ottawa-bound over past months skims an overload of reminders that rattles the cobweb of personal memory. But unlike the spider, I want to look away, to be free from that which can easily upend the calm.

And so I read the road signs: Odessa and Bath and Collins Bay: surveys of third and second town and so on: until I arrive at first town—the King’s town—Kingston and time for iced Americano, caffeine to help keep me awake: then Mallorytown, Brockville and Perth. I think of the places in Britain these towns and villages were named for; named by the Englanders, refugees, loyal to an empire that many, new to North America, were anxious to be rid of; the names an homage to the old world.

Yet today is a new land, and as we charter uncharted coastlines and while the past is unchangeably written into our story, it is not who we are. Today, within the space of the dew at dawn and the dragon flies at sunset, arrive the fleeting moments of being.