True Love?

They have a category at the fair called Best Collective Hobby – Three Items. It can be any sort of thing you collect – rocks, stamps, squished pennies – whatever. I didn’t enter that category this year because I don’t really collect anything, but the week after the fair, I found a large, dead cicada hanging in the window of the chicken coop. I brought it in and declared to the children, “Here you go! This is the beginning of my collection for the fair next year.” Davey found me another cicada. Rosie found me a whole bucket of cicada shells. Delaney found two butterflies. And a friend brought me a large rhinoceros beetle she’d found at church. My desk is quite literally covered with bugs.

Yesterday, Davey might have gone a little over the top, though. I found him sitting at the kitchen table with an index card, a bottle of crazy glue, a can of spray shellac, and…

A BLACK WIDOW SPIDER!!!

She’s the largest black widow I’ve ever seen and was found living contentedly beside the school room door in an old tire. I’m not terribly pleased at having such a specimen in my collection, but it was sweet of him to think of me, wasn’t it?