Spider at my door

The cat sat at the patio door, meowed and looked at me expectantly. I sighed, shoved away from the computer and pulled the drape back from the glass door, revealing a web blocking the top half of the doorway. Busily spinning her way around the web was a fat, ugly garden spider. I cringed as I slid open the door. The cat walked out oblivious to the spider’s presence overhead.
I shut the door. “Look at this,” I called to my daughter.
She came over, looked through the glass at our personal, National Geographic picture.
“Eeooouww, gross,” she shuddered. “Let’s smash it.”
“It’s on the other side of the glass. I can’t hurt you. Watch the way she hooks the strands of web to the anchor lines with her legs.”
My daughter looked at me skeptically.
“No, I mean it. Come and look at this.”
She reluctantly wandered over and watched the spider as it quickly spun, hooked, latched and spun again round and round the center of the web, filling in the spaces.
“All that work and she will take it all down and start in fresh tomorrow,” I mused.
With the porch light behind it and our dining room in front of it, the spider had an ideal location to be watched and catch bugs.
A moth hit the web. With split-second timing, the spider dashed across the fine strands, lassoed it, tied it securely and left it hanging.
“Dad, come see this,” the once reluctant watcher called. He came watched, then went to the front porch and caught a moth seeking to be burned by the porch light. He brought it to the back door and tossed it in the web. The spider interrupted her work to zap and wrap that moth.
The next morning as I let the cat out, I was relieved that the web was gone.
But that night the spider was back and weaving another duplicate web. When I did not see it the third night, I assumed it had moved on.
As my daughter let the cat in, though she looked around the corner and discovered the spider had spun her web in front of the back porch light. She caught a couple of moths to toss it before going to bed.
The once caterpillar-loving toddler had become a teenager who claimed yet another critter as a pet. For weeks she dished up cat food, sprinkled fish flakes and caught moths every night to toss at the spider’s web.
After three or four weeks, she pronounced, “that spider is getting fat.”
I looked, shuddered at its size and kept away from the back porch. “What do you expect after force feeding it?”
“Right and when it gets fat enough, I’m gonna’ smash it.”
“After all this time of feeding it? Come on. Besides, it is probably fat with eggs it’s about ready to lay.”
She shrugged, “Well, maybe not.”
A couple of mornings later as I let the cat out, all I could see of the web was a few strands and a brown egg sack. It will be swept down when I do fall cleaning and rid the outside of all the spider webs and egg sacks.
A little natural science education is one thing. A chorus line of spiders vying to entertain us is quite another.