Butterflies and spiders

These are some of my recent garden visitors. Not much of a garden, in all honesty. These little friends just come for the New England asters, which, as I keep repeating, I love. Each day this week that we've had sun in the late afternoon, the asters have been a hub of buggy hubbub. Yesterday, on one of my two patches of asters, I saw six monarchs (pictured at top) and two red admirals (bottom) all at the same time. There were also lots of bumblebees and honeybees, and a few little, fast-moving butterflies whose names I'm not sure about. On the other clump of asters were three or four more red admirals and another monarch.

And I had an embarrassing experience pertaining to those HUGE old barn spiders I wrote about several posts ago. I was picking the last of my tomatoes, and I moved around to the back of the cherry tomatoe plant to get those I couldn't reach from the front. As I stepped between the tomatoe bush and the sunflowers, I felt a thin strand pull and tighten across my wrists and stomach. A series of thoughts raced through my mind in a second, before I looked down: "That's a spider web. It feels like a big spider web. It's probably just a harmless stray stand, or maybe not a spider web at all. It sure feels big. What if it's one of those big orb webs spun by one of those big barn spiders that I just blogged about?"

I looked down.

It was a big old barn spider. It looked like a furry brown golf ball with eight wriggling legs, fighting to get a grip on my shirt. I said to it--and this is a direct quote--"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG!!!" Thankfully, I calmed myself enough to quicky reach down, grab the strand of web to which the spider was clinging, peel it off my shirt, and fling it into the tomatoes.

Then I looked around to see who was watching this grown man standing next to his cherry tomatoes, shrieking, and spastically jerking. I only saw Andrel, the neigbor's boy, about sixty feet away in his yard. If he had seen me, he was pretending he had not.

It brought to mind another event from when I was in Wyoming. Once I went for a short hike in the Laramie Range, and I climbed up to the top of a large rock formation. I sat there in the late afternoon sun, up on a rocky ledge, enjoying the fact that it was so very quiet and there was probably no one else within a mile of me. Suddenly I heard this buzz: menacing, low, and unnerving. A dark shape, seeming to be the size of my fist, came zig-zagging through the air up from the rocks below, flying right at my face! I said to it--and this is a direct quote--"GAAAAAAAAAAAAARG!!!" I almost threw myself over the edge in my terror. Then the little hummingbird stopped right in front of my face, realized that the blue flower it was flying towards was actually the hat on my head, and zig-zagged away again. Utterly terrifying, for a split second. I looked around to make sure I had not been observed; I had screamed loud enough that any hiker within a quarter mile was probably calling the rangers for help. Sheesh.