Meh.

Frost was at his best when writing about people.

Very crabby. Cute crabby, even.

Of course, I am part of at least three generations of women who have had spider struggles! My daughter and I both had major spider-bite troubles, and my mother was bitten by a brown recluse. Luckily she was on allergy shots, and they say that helped, but her arm was black to the shoulder. Spiders are interesting, but I don’t want to get too close.

It’s all a rug pulled out from your feet with “if,” though.

Here’s Frost’s flower!

Frost’s spider could well have been a crab spider. See the bottom two photos on this helpful page.

God, I love the web.

I don’t remember that poem — I’ll go look it up right now. Thanks!

(Update: five minutes later) A lot of nice lines, but Frost’s conclusion sucks. What anthropocentric bullshit.

I especially like the crab spider for some reason, maybe because it also takes one off in a new direction via the name. And the white on white is pleasing, maybe even a little Frostian, as “Design” popped into my head: “A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, / And dead wings carried like a paper kite.”

Yeah, they’re like the trilliums in that regard (see my Purple Trillium poem earlier in the series). I’m not sure the sort of ants that do that occupy a colony long enough to be displaced by plants they’d inadvertendly planted. As I recall from a Natural History magazine piece on the subject some years ago, the plants evolved this adaptation specifically to take advantage of colony-abandonment patterns.

Cool that you were able to visit CR. When I resume my Bestiary series, I should definitely consider leaf-cutter ants.

I’m back from Costa Rica, and have been busy catching up on things. (New iPhone… having fun with apps!) While in C.R., I saw a few lines of leafcutter ants… amusingly, a half hour after one tour guide had us leaning off the path to watch them going down a tree, we crossed another line of them… carrying their flags square across our own path! Apparently, 30% of Cost Rica’s leaves are harvested by those ants, all to be fed to their fungus gardens. I imagine the fungi would handle alkaloids like those in the Dutchman’s breeches….

Apropos of “nothing”, have you seen the Futility Review. The Zen of despair…. ;-)

(As I wrote, I kept thinking about the old blues song “Staggerlee” and “Jumper on the Line” from R.L. Burnside!)