Tag Archives: spiders

Fiction Friday: Family Reunion

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The Friday Fictioneer Challenge: Write a 100-word story based on the photo.
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Friday Fictioneer photo prompt. Copyright Douglas M MacIlroy

Friday Fictioneer photo prompt. Copyright Douglas M MacIlroy

Family Reunion

Good, a nice crunchy cockroach. I hope it will be enough for the family reunion. I can’t remember who all is coming. Let’s see, 175 of my children, 327 grandchildren and 809 great-grandchildren. All those munchkins! I’m just going to call everyone Sweetie and Honey.

Guess it’s too much to expect everyone to behave for a few hours. Sheila won’t; she kills and eats her husband soon after they arrive; it’s always so embarrassing. (A new husband each year, too. Where does she find them?) The kids run all over, ripping up my web and then . . .

Oh, there’s the doorbell!
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Photography Homework: Lunchtime

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These are the photographs that I turned in for my Class 3 photography homework assignment. Both my subjects happened to be eating, so I categorized them as “Lunchtime.”

This is Madison having lunch. I saw her and her mother at an adjacent table just as I was leaving a sandwich shop. I asked for permission to photograph the baby and the mother was gracious and agreed.

Madison, a baby, being fed lunch by her mother

Yummy


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This is an Argiope aurantia spider, also having lunch. I found the spider while taking photos of a Texas Wood Lizard in my back yard and decided the spider would make a good subject for my homework.

A spider, an Argiope aurantia, eating a cricket

Yummy, in a Mother Nature food-chain way

I must have made at least 11 trips out to the spider web, trying to get a good photo. I was (am) having trouble with my photos being over-exposed. I’d trek out to the web, take seven or eight photos, come back into the house and review them on the computer monitor. Result: Over-exposed. Back out to the spider web. I finally got this one photo that I thought was decent enough to share.

But I’m telling you, if that spider had flinched while I was looking through my camera viewfinder, I would have high-tailed it out of there. It was an overgrown area and I wasn’t thrilled about being there anyway. I was a few inches from an ant mound and I heard rustlings in the tall grasses behind me. If a cricket had landed on me, I would have panicked. If a fire ant had bit me while I was standing there, I’d have had a conniption fit.

Once I thought I saw the spider eyeing me and I started to fret. I didn’t want it to get any ideas about wrapping me up in its web, thinking if it could just catch me, it would be set for life.

I managed to emerge from my photographic safari in the pasture with only a few dozen chigger bites. How lucky can I get.