Astronomy and Spiders

So much to talk about here after a full weekend where I purposely didn’t get online! Two days free of the computer. It was needed I think, to get my batteries recharged, one could say.  And so; First, I’d mentioned in an earlier post that I had a little story to tell. In my writers group we decided to try something different. We chose a ‘prompt’, ‘theme’ or whatever you’d like to call it and we were to write whatever came to us about that ‘prompt’. We’ve done this before but this time was a bit different. We chose “Astronomy”. This is what came to me to write about.

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies). It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the formation and development of the universe.

So, a few mornings ago while talking to my son on the phone, I’m outside trimming rose bushes and some of the plants I bought yesterday for the ‘mound’ flower bed I’m installing in front of my house.  What does this have to do with the stars? Well, while clipping one of the plants I’d bought the day before, I found a spider web, then a spider with a VERY bright red hourglass on its belly. Now this was a brown spider, a light brown, not black, like a Black Widow. So I didn’t know if it was poisonous or not. I told my son about it, we were still talking, and he said he thought that there were actually Brown Widows too. I didn’t want to kill it, not knowing, but he said better to be safe since I was going to be working on the mound later. I didn’t want it hanging around, literally. So, I killed it L.

Later, inside, I looked it up on the internet and sure enough, it WAS a Brown Widow! So actually I did do the right thing, and my son is reaffirmed as being a very smart guy.

Now, I know you are wondering what this has to do with the study of the stars. In French the way one says ‘spider web’ is ‘étoile d'araignée’ which means “star of the spider”! The spider’s web is what alerted me to the spider being there in the first place, and then I saw the red. So this was MY connection to the meaning of astronomy that day, how a ‘star’ alerted me to danger in my universe.

I feel much better knowing I won’t have to deal with ‘her’ while out taking care of my garden nebulae. Just like a meteorite that has already fallen, there are others that haven’t. But at least there is one less to worry about, and it was so cool to have my son ‘take care’ of his mom, as the atmosphere does with its ‘mother earth’!

So maybe it’s a reach on the subject heading, but it was fun to write…