A Day In A Spider's Life

 I was filling the dish pan full of dishes with hot water, having put in some liquid soap.

The water was still luke warm, but the pan holds a lot so I wasn't running perfectly good water down the sink because it was not hot.

I was putting the coolish water into the pan, waiting for the mean temperature to get to good washing heat.

A subsequent event proved that to have been a good thing to have done.

Since that takes time, and since the sink always needs rinsing of the various forms of detritus that accumulate, I had decided to rinse the right side of the sink.

Then I pushed the pan over into the right side of the sink and started rinsing the left side.

That way I could justify using the cooler water while waiting for the water heater to catch up with the flow and go back to filling the dish pan.

In the lower right corner there was a rather large - for sink detritus - blob that caught my attention.

That memory was accompanied by a simultaneous memory of something I had noticed earlier: some form of detritus apparently tangled in cat hair in that exact same location.

Since the cats like getting in the sink when I am not watching, I quickly abandoned my attempt at untangling whatever it was that had been tangled with the cat hair, jumping to the conclusion that I'd need to pull out the detritus and cat hair when I removed the sink rack so I could get at it.

I had just inundated the blob with water from the sprayer so that it would wash over to the drain when I noticed two things.

First, I could see that it was a spider.

Second, I could see that it was being held back from the drain by, not cat hair, but by spider silk.

Oh, I said to no one in particular.

The poor little guy was sitting there with all eight legs folded in a manner that could only be interpreted as surrender or supplication.

The sink cleaning mission suddenly had changed into a spider rescue mission.

Paper towels, I have always said, are good transport vehicles for beings that need transport but that I don't want on or in my hand.

After several failed attempts I was able to get the spider onto the towel, and after several turnings of the towel, to keep the spider on the towel, not on my hand, I got him/her out to the shade of the breezeway deck.

I think I saw him/her raise a leg in thank you.

And then walk off to the wood pile.