Been thinkin’ about…The spider and the boat

The great garden spider, all bright yellow and stark black, was still and waiting on her weaving web there amid blooming iris and peonies and vivid purple clematis. The garden was in the front yard, stretching across nearly the length of the house and was bookended by a showy pink crabapple and a tall fir my grandfather had gifted my mom. Near the clematis trellis and the sunshine shrub the yard sank in. The sunken part gathered water after the spring rains, which was likely why the spider waited there. The gathered water was also why I was there, a four-year-old with a little toy boat which I splashed about beneath the watchful eyes of the spider. The morning dew on that warm, cloudy June morning gathered.

It would be poetic to say the boat was one of those iconic toy sailboats found in those sentimental Edwardian paintings, toy sailboat paintings with an accompanying little boy in a sailor cap but my boat was not a sail boat. And my cap was a little baseball cap that said, "Little Slugger," even though I did not play baseball.

My mom had gone to the Super-X drugstore next to Kroger's, the same drugstore I had ridden to with my big sister while she picked out nail polish to be a witch on Halloween. I don't remember if we decided if she should wear turquoise or amethyst purple. Both had sparkles. But my mom had wanted a home perm and I hated the way home perms made the house smell so she had gotten me a toy boat — a little plastic tanker with accompanying tugboats — so I could play outside while the house smelled like a stinky salon. And for that morning, my little puddle amid the front yard grass became a harbor and the grass beyond the wide open sea.

The perception of a child remains both sentimentally regarded and woefully overlooked. Indulgence is the name of the game but when children come up knowing things, seeing things, understanding things beyond regular knowing, the reality is most often overlooked. Adults always know best, at least until they don't. Shades of Poltergeist come to mind.

The world of my childhood was vast and new, even as I was aware there were adults that either could not or would not see what I saw. Fantasy. Make believe? Or something more? Children and dogs can see the otherworld more easily than adults all scarred with responsibility and guilt. In childhood I passed easily between the places, always on the lookout for shades of fairies or goblins or talking animals. In hindsight, the memories both do and do not make sense.

Somewhere in my past is a green room full of cool, lush cut flowers and pretty crystal vases and a tall, cool woman in a rustling green gown. In another place is a big man with a big black beard, a big man wearing a striped shirt. Behind him, the sun sets over a pond and a weeping willow and he is saying words to me I almost remember. And deep in the oak woods there is a place where we placed jack o'lanterns and lit them so those haunted flickering faces showed the way to a door beyond to a goblin realm. It as a door only I could see. No matter the stories, they always begin and end the same. The worlds are real but not for those who are blinded by their own importance.

Across Britain are found small carved stone posts, two faces on each post. The columns are likely Celtic, possibly neolithic. Either way, the two-faced stone columns were there when the Romans arrived and the Romans called them Janus posts, coining the term "Janus-fairy," named for the Roman god with two faces. But there is something special, but also easily overlooked, in the Janus fairies of Celtic lore. The Janus fairy is two things at once, a very odd idea indeed. When introduced, in the fairytales, to a character, we as children ask, "Is he the good guy? Or the bad guy?" In Celtic lore, the answer is often, "Yes." A very strange thing indeed, echoing reality more than we would like.

All the innocence and all the profanity of the world, existing simultaneously, back to back, appealing against our sensibilities of right and wrong. The Janus fairy laughs.

The dew on the sunshine shrub and the clematis gather, then fall. The little boy is still splashing in the water, toy boat clenched in hand. One of the little tug boats keeps capsizing. The great garden spider, all bright yellow and stark black, is still silent in its weaving. Time is yet always as it is, always as it should be.

The Norse said the Norns wove our fates, silver threads forever in time, inescapable destiny. And the Norse were also the ones to defy fate, to build longships and take destiny — against the odds — into their own hands, and go a'viking. Destiny, free will? The boat is in my hand and I am the captain, even in my Little Slugger cap. The spider is weaving over me against time, and through time. 

Choice. Destiny. Fate. The captain. And free will. Over and again. Always, the spider and the boat.