Fecundity of life and love

It is very spidery out here in the verdant outskirts of Spookytown, and if I had a camera where I could actually control depth of field, you would be able to see a pictorial array of spiders with which I have interacted (long-legged, stripey, jumping, in my sweater at work, etc.). It seems to be spider-breeding season at present, and fertile mother spiders are brooding near their eggs all over the place. One egg sac located just to the left of my front door hatched this morning. You can see the baby spiderlets (so very wee!) to the left of the top sac, on the bricks. (Just fyi, for those of you who don't know, clicking on a photo will give you an enlarged view.) To give a sense of scale, since my archeologist's meter stick hasn't been unpacked yet, here is my right index finger adjacent to another sac, hatched last week.










Just to the right of the door is yet another brooding spider, but this one has arrayed her eggs vertically and atop a bush. None have hatched to date.















As so often happens, the observer turns out to also be the observed -- here, from the livingroom window.