Do kids still play in the yard? With all the digital diversions available, including sports with a Wii, I’m wondering if kids are going to lose touch with the real world. I thought of this the other day when mowing my yard and running across the big black and yellow spider shown below. When I was growing up in Troutman (just call me “Opie”), we had a bunch of kids that spent what seemed like every daylight moment playing in each other’s yards. Around this time of year we’d always see these big spiders and their webs in the bushes and doorways complete with zig zag patterns in the webs. Of course, when one boy saw it, he’d hollar “WRITIN’ SPIDER!” and everyone would tell him not to say anyone’s name around the thing. The theory was that if the spider heard your name, it would write your name in its web, then come after you when you least expected it- probably at night when you were asleep and defenseless. The thought of an attack like that was enough to bring up threats from one boy to the other that one would say the other’s name just to be jokingly mean.
I can’t recall any of my friends being actually attacked by a writing spider in the middle of the night or seeing anyone’s name written in a web. Still, you never know…
Writing Spider
