For most of this summer, I struggled with a spider on our side porch. It all started one day when I noticed the string that turns on our porch light was out of reach for some reason. I pulled it down so I could reach it better. A few days later I noticed that it was again out of reach and I wondered what was happening to the string. This was when I noticed that the string had been incorporated into a spider’s web.

At first I thought I am not going to let some spider beat me. I pulled the string out of her web but the spider kept spinning the string back into web. Every morning I would take it down and the next morning the string would be back in a spider web. This went on for a week or so before I decided I would let the spider have her way. It was only a little stretch for me and I imagined it was a bit more work for her to spin her web and pull the string into it. I was being silly to fight with her about. So I surrendered.

Every so once in awhile I would need the porch light on so I would pull the string as gently as I could so I wouldn’t yank it out of the web. Occasionally, despite my best efforts to be gentle, I accidentally would pull the string out of the web. But the spider would repair it the next day and the string was where she wanted it.

Until the other day. The string dangled freely outside her web which was no longer translucent but grey and old. Day after day, I would check to see if she had reattached the string into her web and each day I was disappointed to see it hanging there.

She hadn’t returned to her web. I told myself stories. She didn’t need the string any longer or she moved to a new location but I knew she was probably dead. Spiders don’t live much longer than a year or so and it had been at least six months since I observed her work with the porch light string. She had probably come to the natural end of her life. It has bummed me out nonetheless.

I was of Katherine Mansfield short story “The Fly” where a man who lost his son in World War I struggles with a fly caught in his inkwell. Each time the fly gets out, the man puts more ink on it and roots for the fly to struggle free from his dilemma. He keeps doing it until the fly eventually surrenders to its fate and dies — upsetting the man.

I am at a certain age when people have begun to die around me at a frightening pace. Three people who I know in just six months. Others are getting sick and taking a long time to recover. Some, I surmise, just aren’t going to get better. Then there is the daily reminder of my own diminishing abilities — not hearing everything, pains in the knee, getting winded when climbing stairs, trouble seeing while driving at night and most of this is not going to get better. Only worse. Yet we, for the most part, carry on.

In the meantime I am waiting for my spider or one of her children to return.