along came a spider

The month of September has been full of obstacles for UNH football team.

Some have been conquered, like their 48-35 victory over a very physical and strong FBS (formerly D-IA) opponent Marshall two weeks ago at the Thundering Herds home field. It was UNH's third victory over an FBS in the past four years.

Some obstacles were just too much to handle, like the dynamic duo of Rodney Landers and Eugene Holloman, who together catapulted James Madison's offense over UNH's defense for a 41-24 victory in the first game of the season.

And some were not obstacles at all, like Dartmouth.

But this week, the #11 Wildcats (2-1, 0-1 CAA) will face what will easily be their toughest obstacle in the season thus far, when they travel on Saturday to Virginia to take on the twenty-fifth ranked Richmond Spiders (2-1, 0-1).

His name is Tim Hightower, he is the Spiders' starting running back, and he is the one thing on the Wildcats mind as they prepare for their second Colonial Athletic Conference game in the season.

"They can run the football pretty well," said Wildcats coach Sean McDonnell. "He (Hightower) looks to be much improved over the last year. He's got some finishing ability this year. He just looks faster on tape and therefore becomes priority number one."

With two CAA "Offensive Player of Week" awards to his name already this season, Hightower will come into Saturdays game as the top rusher in the conference, with 614 yards rushing including one for 90 yards, through just three games and 9 touchdowns.

The stat that is most impressive however, is Hightower's average yards per carry. This 6-foot-1-inch senior averages 10.8 yards per carry. So every time he runs with the ball, he more often then not gets a first down.

"Hightower looks a lot faster this year," said UNH junior and starting linebacker Matt Parent. "He is blazing. He breaks tackles, gets to the edge, and then he is just down the sideline. We all have to just run to the ball and tackle. He has definitely improved his speed over the summer. Everyone has to play very well this week."

With stats like that, and Richmond being ranked first in total offense in the CAA, averaging 521 yards per game, the Wildcats defense are most likely going to have to play their best football on the season to keep the Spiders offense of the field.
Eudora Welty was not a garden writer, but she wrote about gardens. Her works of fiction are populated with gardening women and the flowers that she and her mother, Chestina, grew at the family home in Jackson, Miss.

Many old-fashioned annuals and perennials � heirloom roses, daylilies, camellias, spider lilies, mock orange, winter honeysuckle, rain lilies and Roman hyacinths � still bloom at the homeplace, which Miss Welty donated to the state of Mississippi upon her death in 2001 at age 92. The restored house is open for tours.

The garden also has been refurbished to resemble the years when Miss Welty was still an active gardener. Two women intimately familiar with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author will lecture about her life, her writings and a garden's influences on Nov. 1 at the Dallas Arboretum. A Writer's Garden Symposium features four speakers, including Susan Haltom, a garden historian who worked with Miss Welty to develop garden restoration plans, and Nancy Ashley, a Dallas reviewer and native of Mississippi, who will describe the impact of the garden and family on the novelist's works.

Other symposium speakers include Julia Reed of New Orleans, a senior writer for Vogue, who will share anecdotes about gardening, entertaining and growing up in the South; Susan Wittig Albert, a Hill Country writer of mysteries who also produces a weekly herbal newsletter; and Nancy Collins, a writer for Architectural Digest whose beat is celeb houses and landscapes.

Nancy Bierman, president of the arboretum's Woman's Council, conceived the symposium (9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., including lunch and party favors) and began lining up participants more than a year ago. The good news: There are still a few reservations available, says Ms. Bierman. The bad: Reservations that remain are $245 each, and higher. ("This is a fundraiser," she says. "We're trying to pay off the Women's Garden.")

The site www.mdah.state.ms.us/welty/ has a section about its native daughter, including a slide show with vintage family photos, plant lists and bits of information that fellow gardeners (and Southern-fiction literary types) will find entertaining. There's Eudora hard at work in the garden, watering. Here's Chestina, inspecting her beloved roses in white gloves.


Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History
Gracious living in the South: Writer Eudora Welty, like many women of her generation, tended flower gardens with devotion. I know of Miss Welty, but I regret to say I have never read her works of fiction. Always meant to, though, so I read the Web site with interest, then with a pang of recognition. Generations of my father's family come from south Georgia. His two sisters practiced the womanly art of Southern-style gardening there and in Alabama, in the '50s, '60s and '70s. When it came to planting flowers, they were willing to perspire, as long as there was a Winston cigarette and an ice-cold 6-ounce Coca-Cola every few hours.

I have my Aunt Fannye's broad-brimmed garden hat with the blue-print string tie. And I wear it � for about a minute until my head gets too hot. I transplant fresh material into mixed containers with Aunt Eunice's slim trowel. Most of the red paint is worn away and the pointed tip broke off before I acquired it, but it does the job in soft potting soil.

I grow queen's wreath (Antigonon leptopus) because it clothed a wire arbor spanning the side gate to Aunt Fannye's lush, shady back yard and, to a 5-year-old, the name was romantic. I tolerate montbretia ( Crocosmia) and its habit of flopping over and smothering its neighbors because my start came from Aunt Eunice's flower bed edging the patio. I've wasted plenty of money on camellias because Aunt Fannye's shrubs were covered with breathtaking flowers. I still succumb to the memory and try again, in vain, every few years.

I inherited my gardening gene from these beloved aunts, gone many years, and my mother, who turned 98 last week. They practiced the Southern tradition of pass-along without a second thought and always had cuttings rooting in a coffee can. I worried we would be imprisoned on the way back to Dallas at the Mississippi River, where agriculture officials stopped every vehicle looking for contraband (taking any plant material across certain state lines was illegal, but cotton bolls were especially heinous). My father, the driver, always answered no. My mother did not speak. That's because those coffee cans were jammed under the front seat and starts wrapped in wet newsprint and aluminum foil were inside the ice chest. I cowered in the back seat.

So I'm going to the symposium to recharge my memories and relive my childhood. If you're interested in attending, check with Ms. Bierman at nsbierman Forget "Snakes on a Plane." That was a movie somebody made up.

This is much, much worse, and it's happening right now, on Weasel Drift Road in West Paterson, live and in the freshly bitten flesh:


Bugs in a Car.

I'm coming down the hill, the steep, winding drive that lifts traffic off Valley Road toward Garret Mountain. Just minding my own bee's-wax. And I hear a bzzzzzzz-ZZZZZZZ-zzz-ZZZZZ!

Before you entomologists in the audience say anything, I know that what I am hearing is not a bug. Bugs, you would tell me, are a particular subset of beetles, and you are sick and tired of hearing that word applied to the whole far-flung insect world. What I am hearing is probably a Hymenopterid: sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants.

This doesn't even get into spiders (arachnids) and small, wingless, blood-sucking ticks (families Argasidae and Ioxidae) and horse flies the size of palominos. But "bugs" is catchy, and I'm not here for a zoology lesson. I'm here fighting for my ever-loving life!

What I am hearing is a wasp. I'm sure you experts could tell me what kind and even sketch the chemistry of the venom. This one is a deep black and, I discover, emerging from a vent on the dashboard. It fans its wings and takes little steps along the turn signal lever toward my bare arms. The stinger looks hypodermic.

I know a little about stinging insects. Most bees, as I recall, lose their stingers in the victim and their lives shortly after, since the stingers stay attached to some vital insect organ.

Wasps can sting you all afternoon, right through cocktail hour and into the late news, sting you until their own bedtime, which might be in six days. As I watch the wasp reach for my third knuckle, right hand, I remember an incident from childhood that started with kids on the other side of a gully in a public park, throwing rocks at a fallen wasp's nest. This looked like fun, so I picked up a single stone and tossed it.

Wasps exploded from the nest in a big angry ball, hurtling right at my nose. Possessing a moderate brain and young reflexes, I turned and ran. The waspy mass pounded the back of my head and spread over the crown, and I was stung, I think, 36 times. I remember my mother counting the bumps. My grandmother saved the day by hauling me, screaming and howling, over to a nearby creek, digging into the underwater mud and slapping some onto my head.

There is no mud in this car...no wet mud, anyway. I pull the right hand back into my lap, and then I notice, gargoyle-creeping toward the remaining hand, a fairly large spider.

I know, I know. This is not a bug, either. We can talk about the wonderful world of arachnids later. Some spiders don't bite, that much I know. The ones that do sometimes trigger a prolonged and painful death. Which kind is this? Gee, I left my Guide to Venomous Insects at home!

At this point I'm approaching the stop light where Weasel Drift hits Valley Road, and the light jumps to green. I face a sharp, a REALLY sharp, turn. I feel little legs against my left pinkie.

This is where I look down and see something I have never seen in my car: a centipede. I watch it surmounting the laces of the Rockport oxford on my accelerator foot and dangling over the tongue. Instantly I flash to a long-forgotten memory, driving at 70 m,p.h. on I-90 after a visit to the Wisconsin countryside and suddenly seeing (and feeling) a field mouse dance across my ankle. That ended in a BIG swerve that nearly put me into a tanker truck. All I have ahead of me here is a school bus and a Dodge Ram four-door towing a trailer full of gardening equipment.

Oddly, the voice that jumps into my head (after a silent scream) belongs to Vince Lombardi, from an old Green Bay Packers film: "What the HELL is going ON here?" I wish I had the rest of him with me, so I could say, "Squish 'em, Vince!" I pull the foot off the accelerator, and the centipede pauses before heading up under the pants cuff.

Understand, now, that for the last few years I have become a confirmed bug-saver. Anything I see in my quarters with six or eight legs gets a polite escort out, in a hard plastic cup with a postcard slid over the top. I have even removed fairly hairy spiders and a wasp or two. I console myself in those cases with the thought, "These guys came in by accident. They REALLY want to be outside." I do not want to hurt them. I hope they can feel that.

At the moment, I am feeling THEM. As the spider tickles the side of the hand, I inch the flesh slowly away. The centipede has stopped on my shin, possibly to feed, and I give the leg a quiet shake.

The wasp responds to these gentle movements with what I read as an explosive tantrum. It jackhammers past my left ear, zzzz-ZZZZZ-zzz-ZZZZ, grazes my temple, hits my bald spot with a "bip-bip-bip!" I give the steering wheel a spasmodic jerk, and I look up through the windshield to see the gardening trailer at what looks like a strangely tilted angle, a sharp back corner headed for my outside mirror. Oddly, I'm more worried at that moment that I have lost track of the spider.

Later, I would try to figure out why these visitors all picked the same day to crawl into the car. My first thought is the "last hurrah" theory: a final warm-weather insect extravaganza before the first big frost kills the buzz. Then I would remember that I had left the windows open all night. A wise friend of mine would inspect the car and offer another ruling: McDonald's bags, three of them on the floor to my right. "They're empty," I would protest. "Crumbs," she would say. "Sticky sugar stuff."

Regardless, in a panic as I straighten the wheel and pound the brake on Valley Road, I switch to full impulse. The Dodge Ram guns ahead, sparing me a roto-tiller through the windshield, and I lunge at the window control button, snapping it down. As the window sinks, the spider peeks from under my left cuff, and, with a single shake of the hand, I launch it into traffic.

Wooo-HOOOO! I know I should feel badly, consigning the spider to asphalt and tires. But, hey, philosophically speaking, don't we all pop out blinka-blinka into a strange new world and make the best landing we can?

I have a moment, then, to watch the centipede emerge from under the pants cuff, promenade back across the shoe and head for the nearest McDonald's bag. In a single lunge I grab the bag's top and curl it over. Gotcha!

This leaves the wasp, and the wasp, apparently, isn't leaving. It's dive-bombing the back window, then the side window, then my other ear, zzz-ZZZZZ! I roll down ALL the windows, and the resulting wind storm slaps a Big Mac wrapper against my right cheek. Miraculously, the wrapper seems to startle the wasp, which flees past my nose and out into the wide, wonderful world.

A few minutes later, as I'm releasing the centipede into a neighbor's flower bed, I consider our human estrangement from the natural world. If we can't figure out how to get along with these creatures, most of whom have their very small brains near their abdomens, how can we expect to fathom each other?

On the other hand, most people I know don't sting or bite, and, usually, I can reason with them. I feel happy, suddenly, to be alive, and when my neighbor approaches to ask what the hell I am doing in his garden, I can honestly say, "Smelling the roses."
Where are profound life lessons to be found? Grandpa and Grandma? Sure. The educators who kept the spark of our intellect aglow against a tidal wave of hormones? Of course. Our parents? To be sure. A teensy-weensy spider? Say what ...?
This is a tale about a wonderful creature that has joined our family for the summer. I have no idea where this column might take us. Let's just push off from shore and see where the current goes.

First, perhaps, is to set the scene. The small overhanging roof over our back door was selected, for whatever reason, by a spider about as big around as the tip of Good Wife Norma's index finger. If I ever knew how to determine the gender of a spider I've forgotten, so for our purposes today let's declare it to be a her. Why female? This story is about unbelievable tenacity, remarkable skill, ingeniousness and uncomplaining sacrifice. As we all know these are decidedly female traits.

GWN and I marveled when this wonderful web appeared across a corner of our little porch roof. The light made it positively iridescent in the early morning. The spider herself stayed up in a far corner, protected by the roof and concealed from any potential victims that might pass by and become ensnared.

I'm fully aware 90 percent of you would have emptied half a can of "RAID!!!" into our little arachnid teacher's face. Not us. We were way too captivated by its marvelous web-spinning skills.

Make no mistake; any spider that crawls up a wall inside GWN's house had best have its affairs in order because it's certain curtains. But outside is a different matter. That, it seems to us, is where spiders belong. Where God intended them to be if you will.

Then, disaster! GWN unknowingly destroyed the web completely, most likely as she bent over to retrieve a wiener dog from the fenced Defiling Zone directly below the spider's work.

We were honestly sad. No kidding. Felt terrible about what had happened.

They were wasted tears. (No, silly, not actual tears. It's just a spider for cryin' out loud.) Twenty-four hours later the whole thing was right back in place. This was one stubborn spider. Industrious, too. How she spun all those strands in such a short time I'll never know. We didn't see that part. We just went out the next morning to drop the wiener dogs into The Dead Zone and there it was ... shimmering exactly as before.

Then the unthinkable.

This time it was me who tangled in the web, destroying it even worse than before. If one stays right against the house, we learned, one remains clear of the web during this whole several-times-daily tube dog lowering and raising process. But thoughtlessly veer even slightly to the left and it's bye-bye web.

It was. Again.

So what happens? You guessed it. The next morning it was back, even bigger and more fascinating than before. This time a complex series of tiny little lines anchored it to the barbecue in only two places. Incredible! The only downside? It's going to be brats out of the microwave until winter forces our new neighbor to find another home.

Two complete rebuilds? Both accomplished overnight? Are you kidding me? This spider now has my complete attention. All of a sudden I'm looking close, very close, at a spider web. I find myself examining its every detail as never before, and believe me in 58 years I've been next to a few webs. I even reached up and touched her on the back the other day, ever so gently. She immediately sprinted, panic stricken, to the very center of her web and braced herself in defense.

What a lesson we're learning from this most unlikely of teachers. Almost all of the qualities we hold dear in humans are graphically evident in this amazing creatures.

Here's what really grabbed me. This time she rebuilt a little bit to the left of where the first two webs had been. How far left? Exactly far enough to keep us web-free as we and the dogs come and go.

I was stunned. Couldn't believe it. There's no predicting when one of God's own is going to 'sit down beside' you and deliver a sermon. I'm so glad we were listening.