I continue reading my words from forty, thirty, twenty years ago and find a newspaper clipping from a Seventies column on Little Known Facts – just imagine that there were once little known or unknown facts. There was no internet. It was not possible to travel by google satellite and drop down into a hidden drainage or an impossible-to-reach box canyon or a dangerous city street. It wasn’t possible to name something unknown without visiting a library or a bookstore.
Here is a Little Known Fact: Parts of a spider’s web reflect ultraviolet light. (And) so create designs visible to insects. Which are drawn to the web therefore. The bug in the web didn’t necessarily get there by accident. It probably was lured there by ultraviolet decorations.
A tiny spider has built a filmy web above my desk. The web stretches from a ceiling beam down to the tip of a dried stalk I once picked in a Mojave Desert wash to the west of my former Yucca Mesa cabin. There are fat seed pods on the branches of the stalk. I don’t know the name of the plant. I google plants with pods, Morongo Basin. I find nothing. It takes me four tries to give up and photograph the plant 
– which is complicated because my cell camera is lousy, the plant sits in front of a cedar raven carving which is nearly the same color and, if I move the plant to photograph it more accurately, I’ll tear the spider’s web. I won’t do that.
For the last few weeks, the spider has been rappelling down to hang a moment in front of my computer screen, then reel itself back up to the web, the web that were I an insect I might see glowing with fantastic purple designs. It goes back to work. I go back to work.
And you? Do you have words from your past? What are your little known facts? How do you leave something alone so a story can emerge?
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