Naturalist spiders

A noiseless, patient creature with designs,
but not on you

This is not paranoia. I'm definitely being watched.
Sitting on my doorstep with coffee and binoculars this sunny October morning, my mission is to see what the blue jays are shouting about. But something's behind me. It's like the feeling you get in a crowded room, of being looked at. It could be an old friend trying to place your face. Or it could be a figment of your imagination.
No one else is home today. I doubt if it's a ghost behind me. But involuntarily I glance back anyway, and for no reason my eyes fix on the eave above the door.
Upside down there in her web is a huge garden spider. "Huge" means her two-part body is a half-inch long and her eight legs splay an inch or so over the web. She's black with wedges of bright yellow stabbing along her carapace toward her face.
She's waiting patiently for a fly or moth to blunder into the circling silk, at which point she'll dash along the cords, seize it with her front legs, paralyze it with her venom-tipped fangs, then truss it with threads. She'll store it or eat it right then, melting it with juices and sucking the remains into her stomach, which acts like a pump.
She's not after me. But still. She looks huge and witchlike, with her eight eyes seeming to scope my every move and thought. She's an orb-weaver who waits for her prey, so her vision is limited. Some spiders, like the wolf spider which hunts rather than weaves snares, have excellent vision.
But even the orb weavers are not operating blind. There's that feeling she's aware. An intelligence lurks beneath those rows of eyes.
Spiders construct webs with the deliberation of engineers. Orb-weaver spiderlings' first webs are perfect. As they mature, their designs begin to vary.
Funnel weavers make their webs in grass. One funnel-weaver mother summons her spiderlings to meals with leg movements. She warns of danger by stamping her fourth leg. Wolf-spider mothers carry their spiderlings on their backs. Any who fall off scramble back on. Young spiders eventually leave home by launching filaments of silk to the wind which "balloons" them into the world.
Spiders mate, and their routines look as delicate as rituals. Some female hunting spiders throw down draglines of silk for males to follow. Male spiders may carefully pluck a web to learn if a mature female lives there. In some species, the male gently taps the female. If she ignores him, he goes away. Male wolf spiders dance, and nursery-web spiders present a fly to a female. Some house spider couples live together in the same web.
About 35,000 species of spiders have been identified, and five times that many may exist. In Maine, garden, wolf and house spiders are common, among many others, none of which is dangerous to humans. Black widow and brown recluse spiders, whose bites can make you very sick, seldom appear here.
This spider hanging from the height above my door seems appalling, but she's harmless to me. She seems well aware of my presence, and her design is to see if I tangle up the web, at which point she'll dash away, wait for me to disappear, and then rebuild. I'm receiving this impression, anyhow. We definitely are not alone.