One Morning in Denmark
It was as if all the spiders in western Denmark had spent the night weaving away in anticipation of what their tiny guts knew the morning would bring.
People often think Denmark is mountainous and snowy like the rest of Scandinavia. It is actually flat, has a temperate climate, and often windy, gray, and raining sideways. Yet on this September day there was rare combination of a light mist and a warm still day. Early in the morning I was called outside to look at a lovely silver nimbus that floated over freshly harvested fields—but what caught my eye were the spider webs that glittered across the landscape, their strands made visible by thousands of soft droplets. I would’ve sworn that none of them were there the day before. They ranged from elegant and ordered to deconstructed and sprawling, their designs traditional, avant-guard, private, wide-open, low-slung, scraping the sky. Each bore the stamp of their architect, as distinctive as a building made by Frank Gehry or I.M. Pei or your crazy neighbor: pulling out all the stops, site and materials and deadline be damned, let’s get this done, the sun is about to come up, it’ll be a year before we can do this again and we need to put all eight of our feet forward.
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