Fragments From Floyd

I try to resist overly-quoting myself, so I'll just steer you few Slow Road Home readers to the piece in the book called "Gossamer Days". It's that time of year again, you know. Wait for a cold front to pass through and bring a perfectly clear day without clouds or haze, and begin looking for the floating spiders in mid-afternoon. Do let me know if you see them, and I'll feel like I've directed your attention toward something truly memorable.

I was contacted a few weeks ago by an expat writer and blogger from Prague, asking permission to use one of my images for one of his posts. In that post, he sheds light on the word "gossamer" and makes a connection I had not realized between the floating webs and an old name for this very special event in this wonderful time of year.

...this month is what Americans call Indian Summer; but, in these parts, it's called Babi Leto (Granny Summer). As an American, I always pictured Indians (on paint and pinto horses) hunting buffalo on a warm September afternoon. That's a nice image for the end of summer, but Czechs have a good image, too, and theirs has not lost its historilinguistic continuity as has the English image. Even the British now use the term "Indian Summer" (I asked a British acquaintance).

The former English tradition, which goes back to the same time as the Czech tradition, has broken with its past and forever lost to modern English. In old English, there were no Indians, so what was Indian Summer called centuries ago? The only remains of the Old English tradition is in the word gossamer, which are the very fine strands of spider webbing that baby spiders use, kind of like fine silk parachutes, to fly far from their birthplace.

On a warm September day, this gossamer fills the forest air and looks quite beautiful as it catches the light. Old English folks thought it looked like goose down floating through the air, so they called late summer Goose Summer, which is nowadays only evidenced in the etymology of the word gossamer. Our Goose Summer transformed into a word for baby spider parachutes, and our original Goose Summer changed into an Indian Summer--causing the original Old English folklore to become disconnected and hidden within the etymology of a rarely-used word.