This poem began out of my fascination with the huge yellow-and-black garden spiders I would see at my husband’s ranch in Central Texas. Their circular webs could be as much as two feet in diameter, often connecting one bush to another, and were amazing feats of engineering. Yet they all started with a single thread. The Central Texas Writers Society published “AH, SPIDER” in its 2021 anthology.
My list of wanna-do’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving did not include getting on a bus in Laredo at 6:30 in the morning and riding for 13 hours back to Rice Institute in Houston. I knew that boredom and a sore butt were a sure bet. What I didn’t see coming was a searing moment of ineptness and failure. I didn’t see a moment that haunts me still.
Now at St. Peter’s School, they taught us we should always obey the law. The nuns also said it was a sin to disobey your parents. Suddenly my brain was full of anxious bees. I couldn’t obey both rules. Which one was more important? Grandpa wasn’t exactly a parent, but he was certainly Daddy’s father. And anyway, he was driving the car.