And the mother spider spends all her days and all her nights huddled next to her egg sac. She has covered it with a gossamer sheet. Inside it she has stowed one slender moth. The moth would make a good final snack for the mother spider, but she doesn’t take a bite of it. She stands her watch, night and day, right by it, but she lets it be. It will sustain her spiderlings long after she is gone. It is her gift, her breakfast for her brood. It is her posthumous lesson to her children. It will show them what they need to live. And though they never met their mother, they will have learned a great deal by her example. Her sacrifice paid off.

At long last, the mother’s waning shell of a body forsakes her. She falters. Her will has never ended but her spark dwindles. A gust comes along. This wind may not match the gale that she has recently endured. But it comes along just when her spark eludes her. And she is blown away, off the wall, away from her precious, precious brood and into eternity. All that’s left from her prodigious summer of success is her egg sac and the moth that is her bequeath to the babies that she cannot ever meet.

Listen. A quiet giant has existed.

Photo: Mother, moth & egg sac (Photo subject on Tim’s & Debra’s garage, Nov. 2010)

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