So I can’t stop obsessing about this amazing spider I found in our chain link fence today.

She’s fantastic, right? Right?

And she made that egg sac last night. That thing was not there yesterday. None of that was there yesterday. Last night, empty fence. Today, giant spider and super-enormous egg sac.

She looks tired. She wasn’t moving, but somehow she seemed stressed-out that me (and the kids, and my niece) were hovering around her, snapping pictures from both sides of the fence and exclaiming over her.

And I know that Charlotte was just a grey spider, and this spider is obviously not, but I can’t help but feel a kinship between this lady and the fictional arachnid who saved a pig named Wilbur.

I have already set my mind to make sure those eggs hatch out in the spring, even if the Internet says there are probably about a thousand spiders in there.

Oh! And the Internet also says that this kind of spider is actually called an Argiope Writing Spider. If that isn’t some kind of lovely coincidence, I don’t know what is. I needed another writer around here.

Of course, like Charlotte, this spider’s days are numbered. After somehow creating something in one night that is larger than her entire body, she is just about finished here. Internet believes she will hang around, protecting her magnum opus the best she can until the first hard frost, and then she’ll die.

Then it will be up to me.