He looks ferocious, with his

hairy grasping arms, hunched shoulders and bulging eyes.

Alert to any movement in the

flat world he rules, he is capable of springing into action at the first

sign of an intruder.

Or a meal.

But take away the magnifying

glass and he's just another spider hitchhiking with us. Not many spiders,

three-eighths of an inch across, have traveled hundreds of miles in just

a few days from where they crawled from an egg sac.

My love-hate relationship with

spiders dates from my acquaintance with a little soft-gray lady who lived

atop the old upright piano in the living room of my childhood home. She

apparently hid under the runner there, but emerged when I practiced, yo-yoing

up and down between me and the music.

I was convinced she was expressing

appreciation. Maybe it was just the vibrations.

Now, however, I'm more likely

to mutter unmusically about the dusty webs the little weavers leave behind

on shelves and the corners of ceilings, the tangles adorning the porch

rafters, and the strands that stretch across the kitchen overnight, set

to catch my face as I stagger toward the coffee maker.

I flail at them with brooms

or the long-handled "Oscar" a daughter gave me for Christmas

one year. The sticky silk, of course, does not shake off and requires

disposal by hand, which evokes another burst of malevolence on my part.

Yet I've become enamored of

the bright black-and-yellow striped garden spiders that in other years

have woven spectacular orbs on the big windows where we observe their

industry close-up. We watched one craft her trap from foundation lines

to the zigzag stitching in the center, congratulated her when she caught

flies and grew bigger by the day, then mourned when one cold morning we

found her on the deck barely able to move her elegant legs, a state from

which she would not recover.

(We've seen fewer of these

beauties recently, and none at the house. Last year and this, one was

in the bushes near the end of the golf cart tunnel under Peachtree Parkway.

Last year's lasted until cold weather. This year's disappeared early in

August.)

On the boat, we deplore the

way the white gel coat gets black-polka-dotted under every web. In autumn

cruising especially, gossamer ­ long glittering strands of airborne

cobweb ­ festoons the boat like tinsel on a Christmas tree.

When spiders dare to board,

we nearly always lift them by one of their silky cables and toss them

to the wind and waves. "Survival of the fittest, buddy. If you are

meant to survive, you'll figure out how to swim, real quick." And

they do, often well enough to make it