DADDY LONG LEGS AND THE INLAND TROPICAL STORM
About a dozen daddy-long-legs, who live on and under the covered deck and feed around the porch light and in adjacent trees, are congregating inches from my front door, waiting for the chance to rush inside the cabin away from the unfamiliar and unnerving tropical storm-strength winds. Likely from birth, they have known the deck as their tenable and even comfortable home and fear being blown into the unknown by the gusts.
Yes they are aware of their body weight relative to the wind strength they feel. They are sentient and well-grounded in who they are and in the practical issues around their physicality. They know when they're hungry and thirsty, when it's night and day, and when it's hot, tepid, cool and cold, and that they're somehow related to their fellow daddy-long-legs.
I don't know if they dream or what they dream about if they do, but I don't seriously doubt that they do, and if they do I don't doubt at all that they dream of a strange alternative life on and around their deck and its adjacent trees and that they awake from their dreams a bit unclearly with a combined sense of the strange and familiar.
I very gently brush them aside as I begin to try and enter the cabin. They scurry back and reclaim lost ground. One more quick dainty cleansing and I slip inside without the door crushing any. Their chances of survival on the deck are greater than their odds of slipping by ferocious napping cats suddenly awakening and eluding the oblivious late-night dark-room steps of the giant door-opening oaf.
They simply instead need to hide behind and under the tarp-covered naugahyde sofa some wannabe hillbilly placed on the deck, at least until the storm successfully negotiates the atmospheric effect of the earth's rotation and moves itself out of daddy long legs range. I decide to let them learn this for themselves, the daddy long legs, that is.
About a dozen daddy-long-legs, who live on and under the covered deck and feed around the porch light and in adjacent trees, are congregating inches from my front door, waiting for the chance to rush inside the cabin away from the unfamiliar and unnerving tropical storm-strength winds. Likely from birth, they have known the deck as their tenable and even comfortable home and fear being blown into the unknown by the gusts.
Yes they are aware of their body weight relative to the wind strength they feel. They are sentient and well-grounded in who they are and in the practical issues around their physicality. They know when they're hungry and thirsty, when it's night and day, and when it's hot, tepid, cool and cold, and that they're somehow related to their fellow daddy-long-legs.
I don't know if they dream or what they dream about if they do, but I don't seriously doubt that they do, and if they do I don't doubt at all that they dream of a strange alternative life on and around their deck and its adjacent trees and that they awake from their dreams a bit unclearly with a combined sense of the strange and familiar.
I very gently brush them aside as I begin to try and enter the cabin. They scurry back and reclaim lost ground. One more quick dainty cleansing and I slip inside without the door crushing any. Their chances of survival on the deck are greater than their odds of slipping by ferocious napping cats suddenly awakening and eluding the oblivious late-night dark-room steps of the giant door-opening oaf.
They simply instead need to hide behind and under the tarp-covered naugahyde sofa some wannabe hillbilly placed on the deck, at least until the storm successfully negotiates the atmospheric effect of the earth's rotation and moves itself out of daddy long legs range. I decide to let them learn this for themselves, the daddy long legs, that is.
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