Spider Eyes

Children and rituals go together. You do something once with a four or five-year old and you just have to understand that now thats what you always do. Bedtime rituals. Holiday rituals. You must be orthodox and perform them correctly each time.

We have some rituals with Ava and Madison at the farm. Melinda taught them a really cool Girl Scout trick of hunting spiders at night. You take a flashlight and hold it to the top of your head and walk out in the grass. Soon you'll see bright green jewels sparkling everywhere. Those are spider eyes. Really. If you follow your light and walk up to them you will find a striped-brown wolf spider waiting for you. Taylor had his army headlamp with him and that works really great. Its very bright and the field sparkles with those shiny green eyes. I tried to capture this with a camera and a flash, but only one little sparkle shows up near the center of the photo. At any rate, now we have to go spider hunting every night. So we do.

Melinda arrived around 6:30 tonight. Alan had pulled into the driveway with Madison and Austin only ten minutes earlier -- no Kat, no dogs. We ate dinner and soon Taylor, Amber, Ava, and Jonas returned from an afternoon excursion to San Antonio. From that time on, the house rocked. Jenna will show up tomorrow.

Ava and Madison ran to greet each other and hugged. Ava picked up Madison and carried her from the yard to the front porch. It's nearly 11:00 and the girls are still chattering and giggling in the bed.

Rituals are important to grown-ups, too. Taylor inquired about whether there would be fireworks stands open around Floresville, because when he was a boy we bought them and fired them off at Grammy's farm. He bought a BB gun to teach Ava to shoot here, like I'd done with him.

And tonight I sat on the front porch watching the full moon rise, because that's what I do when I'm here and there's a full moon.  It launched from the horizon and slowly climbed in the sky, shining bright against the darkness like a giant spider's eye.