Friday the Thirteenth

Last night we were honored with a visit from our #1 son as we are a convenient bivouac on his return home to Los Angeles from Napa, where he was hanging out at a sales meeting with a bunch of bicycle wonks. He works for Easton Bell, a company which makes all manner of bicycle gear, among other things. It is a testament to their wonkiness that this meeting was taking place during the grandest bicycle race of them all, the Tour de France, yet nobody was watching it, or apparently even talking about it. We were pleased that he preferred our company to endless bicycle talk and a pleasant evening ensued getting caught up on family matters.

I set out this morning thinking that, lacking the patience for waiting for a black cat to cross my path, I might be able to find a symbolically ominous spider web. I felt this would be a fairly easy task since our garden, and even our house, seems to be festooned with spider webs, often with a large spider and the remains of her dinner lurking in the center. Apparently the old adage "out of sight, out of mind " has been proved to be correct, since all the spiders have apparently gone wherever spiders go in the summer. I have removed spider webs from the outdoor furniture, the porch lights, the car mirrors, stretched across the driveway, even every window in the house, inside and out. Today--not a spiderweb to be found. It's as if some higher power has hoovered them all up. Or maybe it was just the Orkin man . I have repaired indoors, hair full of leaves and twigs, to blip some of my collection of guardian angels. They must have been on the job as I teetered on top of a ladder looking for spiders.