She lives at the corner of

our house where the glass room meets the screened porch,

sheltered by the eaves. There she rests, head down and

legs stretched languidly while we scurry about our busy

lives inside.

Several times a day we stop

to admire her plump black-gold-white body and the glossy

racing stripes on her graceful legs. She seldom leaves

the soft mat in the center of her web, except to pick up

some (formerly) fast food for her supper.

Don't bother asking why I

attack other cobwebs inside and outside the house -

I can't explain it. I want them gone, those matted,

stringy, dusty-gray, gummy tangles swathing my window

sills. If I can catch their weavers, I take them outdoors

rather than kill them, but, yes, they were among the

targets of a recent fumigation.

But not Charlotte.

Charlotte is a garden spider, a huge one, whose orb web

is a masterpiece of graceful engineering. From the

solarium I can look at it edge-on, like the rings of

Saturn, divided only by spokes into perfectly spaced

cells.

Charlotte, whose body alone

is an inch long, the tips of her legs nearly three inches

apart, is the largest of four we discovered around the

house late this summer. Her smaller sisters live behind

the hydrangeas and next to the air conditioning

compressor.

The evening we first

noticed her, she had a palmetto bug, one of those huge

brown interlopers that send shivers up our spines when

they scurry across a kitchen counter. "Thank you,

friend," I said to the spider sincerely.

"That's one that won't come calling in the

night."

After she dressed her guest

in a lovely silk wrapper, Charlotte dragged him to the

center of her web and held him delicately. Then she

thrust her head into his body to drain him of his life's

juices.

Nest morning the spider

built a new web closer to the glass. It was almost two

feet across, and as she completed the last few

revolutions, her abdomen dipped forward, playing out silk

and tacking it in place deftly with one rear foot.

No dancer was ever more

elegant. Around and around she went - dip, slide,

dip, slide - and the midpoint of the web was closed

with a single, nearly invisible, silken thread.

In moments she spread a

soft carpet across the center, and then as I watched,

stitched her zigzag signature across the hub. From her

several spinnerets, clearly visible from my position

inside the glass, a tough wide band of silk issued, and

her abdomen pivoted from side to side pressing it into

place. Finished, she turned abruptly back to the center

and, hanging upside down, pumped the entire structure

three times as though testing its strength. Then she was

motionless.

The encyclopedia says the

garden spider can rebuild her entire orb web in about an

hour. It also says her species name is argiope aurantia.

Maybe that's why she was named the "orange"

garden spider by some color-blind biologist.

It's been several years

since we've seen garden spiders, and I got to thinking

about the one that built her lacy parlor across the sun

room panels the summer after we moved into this house.

I pulled down a notebook of

old columns. Here it is, the one I wrote in October,

1985, about a spider named Bernadette. (The name

"Charlotte" had already been used, I

explained.)

Some good imagery here:

Bernadette greeting dinner guests with a warm shawl woven

on the spot, in which she gently wraps them. "They

are so overcome by her hospitality that they never move

again, save for a gentle farewell wave from a leg left

protruding from the shroud - er, shawl."

The cedar beams of the

solarium framed her web, stretched from corner to corner,

"as pretty as any of those glass and lead

contrivances sold in gift shops as sun catchers."

We watched her for weeks,

even observing her gentleman caller, a miniature replica

of Bernadette. He must have carried out his mission

before she made a meal of him, if she did, because

several days later she was missing from the center of her

orb. We found her energetically securing one of three

marble-sized brown spheres to a beam.

Two weeks later, I found

Bernadette lying on the deck below the pane where her

industry had inspired us from mid-July to late October.

She was too weak to climb back to her home, so I shielded

her with a leathery oak leaf. When I checked that

evening, her pretty black and gold body was stiff.

But looking forward only a

year, I wrote, "In the minute spiderlings sleeping

in three egg cases, Bernadette's ultimate immortality is

assured. One morning next spring, in God's annual

re-creation of the world, maybe one will escape the

pitfalls awaiting such tiny creatures and find her way

back to the old home place, and Bernadette's daughter

will become the silent companion of another season."

And of course, that's

exactly what happened - 14 times. Why not a

genealogy of animals? I know a community near Savannah so

old and stable that its members can point to fields of

Salzburger cattle, stock descended from cattle brought in

the ships that carried their own forebears to America in

the 17th century.

I have no problem believing

that Charlotte's 12th great-grandmother was a lady named

Bernadette.

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