Who needs toys when you have bug skins?

I love how he bites his little tongue when he's focused:)

On a lazy Friday morning last week, little Brody dug through the toy box on the back porch in search of excitement. His big black remote control truck was dead again, missing one of the six AA batteries. Arrows from his bow were lost in the tall grass beyond the chain link fence, bubbles had spilled and bouncy balls had rolled down the driveway. I watched him through the kitchen window as I wiped up after breakfast, his little head shaking and shoulders drooped in disappointment. That little back porch toy box was slim pickings for sure that morning.

     Then the rising sun bounced off a single, taut spider web. It hung at a steep diagonal from the roof to the patio below, a single strand of thick, sturdy webbing that looked like it could be strung on a guitar. Our big-bottomed country spiders mean business, and they don't mess around with flimsy materials. He stood for a minute absorbed in deep consideration, then jogged out into the yard under the oak tree, tender little feet smacking against the scattered acorns in the dirt. He dug for a bit and came back with piles of bug skins in his palm, making a few trips to gather enough for his project. 

     It was a beautiful masterpiece of engineering, the rough legs of the bug skins acting like velcro against the spider web. He spent almost the whole hour carefully hooking the skins to the web, creating a glowing work of art, a clump of translucent skins seemingly suspended in mid-air contrary to gravity. He told me the bugs were with Jesus now, but in fact I could hear the cicadas beating their wings in the trees behind the house. They hadn't died but had merely crawled out of the ground and moulted, then flown off on bright green wings to sing in the treetops. They may have been watching their old skins turned into a glimmering toy for my happy boy, more entertaining than anything the FedEx man could deliver from Toys R Us. No batteries necessary.