So. I hate spiders. We live in the country. Nuff said.
This spider is very common in our part of Missouri. This isn't even the biggest one of these that I've seen. The boards on the left are approx 3" wide.
These little white patches on the ground are spiderwebs.
A closeup of the webs.
This is our mailbox. And our new neighbor. (Bleh!)
A close up. If you look closely at the center of the web, you'll see a brown spider. It's body was the size of a quarter. These particular spiders build webs like these overnight. There was a small one (the size of my pinkie nail) that built a small version of this in our bathroom doorway and we'd only been gone a couple hours.