One of the best things about being married is that your spouse thinks of things that never occur to you. . . like yesterday afternoon when Kathy implored me to take a stroll with her through our yard.   Not to do anything in particular.  Just to enjoy its beauty.   I’m embarrassed to say that such a notion would almost never occur to me on my own-  Nine times out of ten it is a specific task that draws me off of the couch and out into the yard.   Once I’m there,  I become Mr. Earth Day – truly enchanted by everything I see. . .  but it’s scary to think of how seldom I would ever venture out into the yard for no particular reason.  (And how dumb is that?)

And here’s another reason why I’m glad to have a partner in this life. . . because she so often notices things that I wouldn’t notice myself unless it smashed me in the forehead.    As we strolled through the backyard and walked past our little gazebo (that’s not what it is, but that’s what I call it-  the little wooden structure from which we hang our hammock chairs)  something odd caught Kathy’s eye.  It was a small, shimmering yellow line hanging in the air-  and as she looked a little more closely, she realized that what she was seeing was about a dozen tiny baby spiders crawling up a strand of a spider’s web-  and as she looked down at the ground,  she saw some sort of nest from which many more tiny spiders were emerging and beginning their own climb upwards. There had to be hundreds of them and it was an absolutely amazing sight.

You know me….  I ran into the house to get my camera and I spent the next twenty minutes or so trying desperately to get a decent picture that captured what we were seeing.  Someone who knew what they were doing would have probably been successful – but my efforts mostly yielded pictures in which that little procession of climbing spiders was either utterly invisible or terribly blurred.   It was maddening –  and in retrospect, I should have been content with just looking and enjoying.   Finally, a couple of shots yielded decent results,  especially when I pointed my camera at the top of the gazebo where the little tykes were congregating by the hundreds.

I’m no fan of spiders,  but this was a truly breathtaking sight- and it brought back memories of two other such moments from much earlier in my life.  One was the summer before I started college,  when I walked through the big city park in Atlantic and saw a row of trees covered with hundreds and hundreds of monarch butterflies- obviously on their way south.   And a couple of summers later, I remember coming across dozens and dozens of tiny baby frogs that evidently had hatched and were hopping across the road that ran beneath the tower dorms.   Now I have a third Marlin Perkins moment to add to the other two – and maybe this will be enough to get me to spend a little more time out in the Great Outdoors ….  the only way really to see such sights.