This summer has been unusually mild and pleasant, but working on a deadline has kept me at my computer long hours every day. Each morning, though, before I surrender to the tunnel of planning and words, I spend a few minutes wandering through the garden with my camera. It's a peaceful and centering practice that gives me a chance to breathe and observe, and every morning brings something new. Sometimes it's the opening of the latest blossom—a spectacular red hibiscus, or another cluster of blooms on the creamy white Carolina phlox. Other times it's just a ray of sun slanting at a peculiar angle along the hydrangea leaves. But one morning last week it was a graceful green and white spider hard at work repairing its web. The light caught the iridescent strands perfectly, and I watched mesmerized as the spider danced delicately over the sticky surface. Even the tiniest spiders elicit a shiver along my spine, a response I suspect is programmed into my DNA (though watching the terrifying cave spider in the 1930s version of Swiss Family Robinson when I was only six probably didn't help). My mother, a thoroughly modern woman in many ways, was adamant we respect the old French superstitions (to this day I cannot put a hat on a bed). Having spent part of her childhood in her grandmother's drafty chateau, she admired spiders for their ability to keep other insects at bay, but she prized them as portents. "Araigner du matin, chagrin! Araigner du soir, espoir!" (Spider in the morning, sadness! Spider in the evening, hope!). She would go out of her way to avoid any place she thought a spider might lurk in the morning but hunt them in dark corners at night. This garden spider was definitely a morning spider, yet it filled me with hope. There it was, going about its business in a wonderfully efficient and effortless way, and I took it as a sign to do the same. So I went inside and got to work.