Faith, Folklore, and Friends

Has anyone besides me noticed the increase in spider webs lately? They are between my windows and screens. They seem to be in every outside angle of my house. They are thicker than usual, very easy to see.  An old farmer's almanac told me that this late summer/early fall web is commonly the last web of a spider's life, when he senses the winter coming and puts all his effort in his final handiwork. That almost makes me feel bad as I use the broom to destroy the webs. Almost. Many years ago, a cousin reportedly saved her son's life using a spider web. The child had cut his wrist badly on a broken window pane and was bleeding profusely. The mother swiped a handful of webs from a corner and packed them on the wound. The spider web immediately staunched the flow of blood. Possibly, that is why God allowed them aboard the Ark. There had to be a reason. The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces. Proverbs 30.28 KJV

Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things. We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation.   While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water. ― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream