August 2: Spider's Web, Walk, Phil Legler, "In Front of Our Houses," New Cartoon

A spider's web is stronger than it looks.  Although it is made of thin, delicate strands, the web is not easily broken  However, a web gets torn every day by the insects that kick around in it, and a spider must rebuild it when it gets full of holes.  Charlotte liked to do her weaving during the late afternoon, and Fern liked to sit nearby and watch...

I love E. B. White's descriptions of these lazy afternoons, a little girl sitting on a stool in a barn, watching a small gray spider weave a web.  He truly captures the mood of childhood summer days, when the biggest worry is whether the ice cream truck is going to come down the street or whether your mother will let you run under the sprinklers to cool down.

Now, at the beginning of August, the dog days of summer are upon us.  Today was absolutely perfect.  Sunny.  Warm.  Almost 80 degrees.  All that was missing was the tinkle of music from an ice cream truck.  I went for a walk this evening, just because it was too nice to stay inside.  I kept passing other people walking, and we would smile at each other, sometimes call out "Isn't it a beautiful night?" or "We have to take advantage of nights like these."

As I passed a copse of trees and shrubs, I saw wild rose bushes draped in spiderwebs.  The webs were thick, gauzy almost.  My nephew, who is a spider nut, has been naming the kinds of spiders he's been finding this summer.  One of the spiders he identified for me was an orb-weaver.  I loved that name, and when I saw the roses covered in spider silk, I imagined it was the work of a single spider.  An over-caffeinated orb-weaver.

My last Phil Legler offering is another U. P. poem.  It's about Marquette, Michigan, where Phil lived and taught at the university.  It captures the rhythms of life in this remote, shark-shaped swathe of land surrounded by water.

Saint Marty hopes all his disciples have ice-cream-filled summer nights.

In Front of Our Houses

by:  Phil Legler

It's hard to rent
in Marquette, Michigan; any day
the city's a buying place where most of us
believe we've settled
down, held by our monthly payments,
staid and dry-docked beside
lake and horizon.

The Mining Journal
arrives, washing the waves in closer,
two ships over the weekend to our front steps,
naming the vessel arrivals,
John Dykstra and Sparrow's Point,
listing tomorrow's docking,
at which harbor.

In winter, ship-
wrecked hunks of ice push up the beaches,
and downtown parking meters like frozen buoys
lean against buildings.
Winter is six months here; we need
our comfortable, high-priced
anchored houses.

But summer nights
we follow in the wake of cars
moving slow as boats drifting by the ore dock,
and those in the bay
where small craft warnings are up, tied
only to their sunset
still reflections.

At the upper harbor
quiet as dusk a ship is leaving,
its lights darkening the waves and windshields
tracing a gull
riding his shadow beyond the lighthouse.
In what deep hold are we stowed
away tonight?

The lake submerges
the city behind us like an island.
Even in front of our houses, owned by the bank,
the neighborhood lawns,
well kept, that stop at our streets at morning,
carry us out like boats
to Canada.

Confessions of Saint Marty