Hi, my name is Elizabeth, but my mother calls me Bitsy.
| She could've called me Beth or Betsy or Lizzy or Eliza, but she calls me Bitsy. She says that's 'cause I'm her littlest. She calls me itsy - Itsy Bitsy! But I'm not itsy at all. In fact just the other day I had the biggest adventure. I told my mom I got caught in the rain and that's why I was late. But I wasn't outside at all you see... |
| I went INSIDE the house. The window was open 'cause it was such a beautiful spring day, the first day when the air is fresh and the blossoms are fragrant. I crawled up the curtains through fields of purple and yellow flowers that had no smell at all, but were wonderfully soft on all eight of my feet. |
| The cat knew that I was there, but cats can't walk on the ceiling and I can. So I crossed all the way over to a beautiful fixture hanging down in the middle of the ceiling over a large table. There was a bowl of fruit directly below the... |
| "It's a chandelier," said the cat. "It's called a chandelier." She was sitting on a chair at the head of the table watching me. |
| "Thank you Miss Cat," I said. Mama always told me that all the other animals were fine as long as you left some distance between you and them. |
| "My name is Anmarie," the cat said and she began to lick her paw, but I knew she was still watching me with her cat eyes all the time. |
| There were bananas in the fruit bowl and fruit flies like bananas and I like fruit flies. I dropped down from the chandelier dead center and fastened a strand of silk to the banana on top of the pile and shimmied back up again. |
| The chandelier was beautiful. It was beaded like a web full of dew and it reflected the sunlight that poured in the open window into hundreds of tiny glittering rainbows over the room. |
| I attached strands of silk from all the points on the chandelier to the fruit below and completed the first rounds of cross supports. I could almost taste that fruit fly when the room went dark and the rainbows disappeared. The curtains were blowing and black and purple and dark blue clouds full to bursting filled the sky. |
| The door burst open the same time as the clouds. It rained water outside but it rained people inside. They were running in from the yard carrying bowls of potato salad and macaroni salad and plates of jam sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and pitchers of pink lemonade which they all set down in a great big huff on the table. |
| The two little girls were shaking their heads like wet puppies and giggling and squealing. The mistress of the house was running to the light switch and a woman I didn't recognize was running to the window. This alarmed me because in all this commotion a fat juicy fruit fly had just become tangled in my web. |
| All at once, and it's hard to tell you exactly what happened first, and I was hanging by a thread not knowing whether to go up or down. The chandelier lit up. The mistress screamed. One little girl squealed and pointed and stamped her feet. The cat jumped on the table, knocked over the lemonade, jumped straight up in the air and then ran really fast when she landed. The littler girl laughed so hard she fell backwards onto her bum. |
| My spider web was covered with sticky drops of lemonade. The lights in the chandelier reflected back white and pink pearls draped in a canopy. And under the spotlight was me. I didn't feel so itsy then, I can tell you. |
| The mistress was hysterical with fright, running around and around flapping her hands in front of her face. The children were holding each other rolling around the floor in laughter. Now the cat was running back and forth with her ears flat back, dodging her mistress' feet. |
| The strange woman was chuckling too, but she was also walking towards the table calmly. She reached out her hand with a matchpack and placed it under me. When I tried to scurry back up, she broke my web above me with her giant finger. |
| She carried me over to the half closed window and I thought the wind was going to blow me halfway across the room. But she closed the window and carried me around to the other side of the house. The wind and rain were blocked out more or less by an enormous pile of firewood on the porch. |
| I sort of jumped and was flicked off at the same time. The bottom of the water spout opened directly above where I landed. I scrambled as fast as my legs would carry me over to the wall and up and in the drainpipe. |
| The rain lasted as long as it takes to spin a web, which is what I was doing in a manner of speaking. I decided not to tell my mom about my adventure because she would only tell me again about house spiders and eaves spiders and people and cats, and, well, since I was stuck out in the rain, it wouldn't be a real lie to just say that was why I was late. |
| "Why are you late? Did you get caught in the storm?" she would say. "Had to wait until the sun dried up all the rain, my itsy Bitsy?" |
| So when she did ask all these very things, I just agreed and said no more. When she asked me if she should write me a little song about this fine spring day, I agreed then too. |
| She might call me Itsy Bitsy, but I know that I'm big enough to scare a person and talented enough to make a chandelier out of a silken web. And if I were going to write a song about today, mine would go... |
Bitsy was a spider
She was in, instead of out.
Down came the rain
And the people start to shout,
'Twas so much fun
Watching people go insane,
So the great big Bitsy spider
Will spin that web again.
©Marion Pennell 1994
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