Wednesday, December 18, 2013

"Maude
" ©

By Abraham Lincoln

I am guessing but I think Maude is about as sweet as they ever get. You’d have to look high and low to find another Maude like this one. Maude, like many females, is tough as nails on her male friends. She does not like just anything that comes along, but she likes soft warm things and has been known to put the best meals away for another day.

I see Maude several times every day. At night I will turn the porch light on to see if I can see her waiting. If I don’t see her then I ask, “You alright, Maude?” I have been known to look for her using a flashlight with two new batteries. When she knows I am looking for her she will reveal herself.

I always see her blue eyes first, and then I see the rest of her hiding by the power line. I spent a considerable amount of time this summer trying to get her to pose for my new camera. I was so close that I am confident she was able to see me and probably wondered what I was trying to do with that big round thing poking at her. She never really moved. So I took her picture. Not once, but several times.

My camera is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT. It takes huge pictures — mine are 48 inches wide. You can do a lot with a photo that wide. You can actually crop out all of it but the part you really want to show. And that’s Maude. She is the one with the startling blue eyes. She has 8 legs and all of them have hair. She never shaves but seems to be proud of the hair that she has.

Maude is a spider. She is pretty in black and brown and she does have blue eyes. I think she has fangs too but I can’t quite make them out on on the photographs. As far as I know the only things she eats is anything that happens to blunder into her web. She is clever about her web as it is built close to the porch light and when it is turned on, there are a lot of bugs attracted to this light and some of them end up in her web — supper time.

I think she knew where to build the web and I believe she is smart enough to know that light attracts bugs. Otherwise she would have made her web dozens of other places. That’s Maude with the blue eyes. You’d probably never see her if you stood under her web.

If you are interested in history, photography close-ups, Nature, or things like Gordon, Ohio, stop and take a look. It is larger than you think.

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