September 5, 2011 -- I bought a couple of succulents and a rectangular pot to put on the corner table I made for the bathroom out of an old, wrought-iron school desk. My original motivation for making the table was to have something the cats could sit on to look out the bathroom window. Because of design defects, it didn't fit exactly into the corner, and the top is a split level surface, partly because of materials deficits. On the lower, narrower part, which is closer to the corner than the front, I wanted to put a plant, hence the succulent purchase. I have to assume, after about 50 years of unsuccessfully trying to grow indoor plants, that not much will thrive in my home but succulents. (However, my husband Marc pointed out that we had stopped trying to grow indoor plants because we had cats. I wasn't convinced that was the only reason, but if he's right, even succulents might be at risk. For instance, Frida has already started tasting the aloe plant.)
While admiring the succulents this morning from the vantage point of the toilet (in addition to the aloe there's an inverted-leaf bluish kind of floret, and some spindly, reddish-green ground cover type plant whose tender little leaves are already starting to wither and drop), I noticed a very elegant daddy long-legs spider (probably a mama) hovering over a small spider neatly encased in silk. The outline of the prey had such distinct legs on either side of the torso, I felt compelled to photograph it.
I struggle with my ability to decide what should live and what should die. Using a high-powered water nozzle, I carried out heartless genocide on tent moth caterpillars one spring. Their predecessors had denuded all our oak trees the year before just after the trees had filled out with new, tender leaves. I've never been able to kill a single tent moth caterpillar--they're very pretty, for one thing--but I had little compunction about slaughtering thousands of them by mercilessly spraying them out of the branches. I later learned, from UC Davis Agricultural Extension, that the trees would recover and infestations of tent moth caterpillars were unlikely to cause permanent damage. I've not worried about them since.
When I accidentally touched the nose of a young rattlesnake a few years ago while pulling weeds, and it didn't strike out at me, I took the trouble, with Marc's help, to capture it in a bucket and relocate it on the uninhabited land across the road from us. Last week, when I encountered a large rattlesnake, coiled in the rocks outside our garage, which had gotten my attention by giving several rattling warnings to our cats, who were of course assessing whether it was appropriate prey or not, I at first tried to scare it away by throwing whatever brooms, sticks, and pieces of broken slate we had lying around. Its only response was to stay in strike position and rattle a bit more. So I immediately called Marc for a lesson on loading the shotgun. By the time I got the gun (and my camera), the snake had disappeared. Would I have been able to shoot it? I guess I was hoping to scare it off, but Marc said if you shoot a snake with a shotgun, you shoot to kill.
I had the horrible thought that this was the young snake I had relocated years before (it looked like it had between 6 and 10 rattles, which would have been about right), and that it had come back to thank me. I know, silly. But that's where I go with deciding whether or not to kill something. I immediately develop a relationship with it, like I did with the fly I tried to wash down the drain when I was a young child. After its third time crawling up out of the drain, I decided instead to douse its wings with baby powder to dry them out and send it on its way.
All I can say is, I'd fail miserably as a spider.
No comments:
Post a Comment