Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is a story that includes a spider as part of the plot. The spider can be present, mentioned, real, or metaphorical.
Phil Yeats wrote today’s
story. He recently published his third novel using the pen name Alan Kemister.
His first two were cozy mysteries. This one has a more serious theme. The Souring Seas is the first
volume in a precautionary tale about the hazards of ignoring human-induced
climate change. For information about this book and others in what will be a
series of three (and possibly more) novels about this important topic, visit
his website – https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/
Phil
Yeats
The walled
garden, sunny but protected from the wind, was a pleasant surprise. Relatively
mobile residents congregate there, and getting to know them has been easier
than I expected.
Early on, I
learned that most residents’ lives centred around memories. I realized I had
almost none. And the few I had were bad memories of frustration and failure.
A late spring
visit to the garden generated my personal quest. I call it my spider log
project because an innocent, but rather large, spider started the ball rolling.
My
inspirational spider slowly descended as spiders do on a silken thread from an
overhanging tree branch. It landed in another resident’s empty teacup. She
shrieked when she saw it trying to climb to freedom. I struggled to my feet,
took the cup, and dumped the spider and the few remaining drops of tea into a
bush. It hesitated for a second, then scurried into the undergrowth.
“Thank you,”
the now sheepish-looking woman said when I returned her cup to its saucer. “Silly,
isn’t it? I’ve always hated spiders.”
A trivial
incident, perhaps, but it jogged an old memory. The pleasant memory stuck with
me for the rest of the day. It was an incident from my university days when I
shared a house with four other students. One of them rushed shrieking from the
bathroom when she discovered a spider lurking in the shower stall. She was by
far the toughest, most self-assured, and hardest driving of our group of
housemates. The incident embarrassed her, not because she dropped the towel she
was wearing when she crashed into me, but because a spider had frightened her.
That evening,
I opened my laptop and recorded everything I could remember about that incident
and the twenty months when I lived in that little house. It became the first
entry in my spider log of memories. Since then, whenever anything jogged a
neutral or pleasant memory, I recorded the details in my log.
I’ve devoted
almost two years to my quest, and I now have a pleasing trove of memories. But I
remain far behind the other residents. They can instantly recall a suitable
memory for any occasion. I often wonder if they make them up on the spot.
*****
The Spot Writers—Our
Members:
Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/
Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/
Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/
Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/
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