The October Spiders

Today I found the first “October spider” of the year. I call them October spiders because they always appear out of nowhere around this time of year, and their webs are clinging to every plant by the time Days of the Dead rolls around on November 1. I always wonder where they hide the rest of the year to be born again every autumn, weaving elaborate spans of fine translucent threads like suspension bridges from leaf to leaf, stalk to stalk, cactus to cactus. I have seen their webs reach many meters across, seeming unimaginable distances for such small creatures. They are appropriately pre-Halloween-y in color – orange and black and yellow and white stripes, and they skitter to the edge of their web if you look too closely at them. Once frost falls in November, they disappear as suddenly as they appeared in September, vanishing back into the void from whence all good spiders come, the realm of pure spider possibility, leaving just mashed tendrils of silky web behind to collect dew drops in the melting frost and finally drift away into the grubby winds of dusty December.

The October spiders remind me each year of the time when I first arrived here – it has been exactly 7 years since I stepped off a plane in Mexico City with 3 bulging suitcases and a blank slate. I came to start a new life in the great unknown. I had no idea what I would be doing here, how long I would be here, where I would live, or how I would manage. I had a huge amount of faith and a lot of art supplies. I remember the customs agents at the airport looking through my bags and pulling out a bamboo barren for making linocut prints, peering at me suspiciously as if I was some art smuggling terrorist. Thankfully I had also packed some already cut linoleum blocks, so I gave them a demonstration on how to make a print and batted my blond eyelashes until I got a smile out them.

I remember my now-mother-in-law picking me up at the hotel with those 3 bulging suitcases and me looking up every word in my Spanish-English dictionary to try to communicate to her that I had left a couple boxes in storage but that what she was looking at was all I owned. And that I was basically at her mercy! She graciously gave me a bed to sleep in and I began my daily ritual of going over to the Dreaming House to wander and look at walls, and slowly dream images into being on those walls. The days were so crisp and bright, and as I wandered around the vast yard over there, the spiders wove their webs around me, stringing thread to thread to thorn of maguey, and I found myself entwined in this place, never leaving, never able to leave because I am bound into it, just as the thread reeled me in, across space and time to be here now, its sticky strong fiber holds me into place. And so I am here exactly where I am supposed to be, watching the October spiders spin themselves into being in the sunlit air.

Here is the poem I wrote last year about it:

I wish sometimes

I wish sometimes, futile like rain on asphalt,
to live in the Hudson Valley, imagining myself
glowing in the aura of light that sifts through the pink
grass blades of early morning autumn hoarfrost, and I
am the fox slinking along the field’s edge into the cover
of a red forest. The leaves are about to be laid bare, crumpled.
Because here I live in Mexico, in a village with the name
of a saint, like all villages in Mexico, unspoken native
names tucked behind like a tail between their legs.
I came here by wish, or because I simply gave up
pushing against the strong arm of the universe and the houses
of stars that lined up along the Milky Way to say,
you will live in Mexico. I like to call it
choreography, created just for me, and I,
who am so clumsy, try to dance it, try to move in time
down long gray streets of cinderblock, nodding
to the ladies who move in their eternal daily pattern
from butcher shop to fruit stand, from tortilla shop
to elementary school, from vegetable stand to bus stop.
And the ladies nod back, watching me. I look
at the maguey, coming too close and bleeding
from the thorns, and their gray-green leaves are not
gray-green, but pixilated, thousands of tiny green dots side
by side with thousands of tiny gray dots, and so my eyes
see an illusion, leaves laid bare, crumpled. The October
spiders are born already and string their cord from thorn to thorn,
painting fine mandalas that sway in the wind and stay
strong in rain. They are everywhere, and I wish
I, too, could be reborn each year.



Image: Spider in the Pyramids, photo by Emily Grieves