01 January - the drowning at Los Gatos

the five-legged spider

9:58AM CST, January 28th

the Huntington household

Lake Road below Cooper's Hill, Leasburg, Missouri

("Out of the south cometh the whirlwind and from the north the cold.")

– Job: Chapter 37 Verse 9

A dusty gray spider crawled out from behind the gas log heater. Seeing it was no surprise to Earl Robert Huntington, since it was he who had just turned up the flame, hoping to coax the bug into the open. The seven-year-old boy stood at one side of the heater with his stockinged-foot raised. There was nothing complex about his plan. He would simply stomp on the spider when it came out of its hiding place. In the end, Earl's plan didn't work. The spider, possibly startled by the quivering shadow above it, skittered back toward the metal case just ahead of the speedy foot.

Thump! "Dang."

"Earl!" his mother called from the kitchen.

Earl stomped twice more.

"Earl. I hear you out there. What are you into now?"

Ruth Huntington's voice was stern, but not angry. Each day since the cold snap had begun, Ruth found it more difficult to prevent a stern voice from becoming an angry one. Whenever she questioned her son, she replayed the sounds in her head and measured each syllable for tones that were too harsh.

Earl had a simpler task. After years of judging his mother's voice, he could always tell the difference between angry and anything else. Since her voice didn't sound angry, he didn't bother to answer.

Honestly though, no answer was really expected. At least, not the first time the question was asked. After years of judging her son's responses, Ruth discovered that most questions had to be asked two, three, four, or even more times before a reply was received. Three was the average. Oddly, that was exactly the number her mother had told her it would be.

"You gotta ask any man three questions to get one answer. It ain't him being hateful. It's just his nature."

Throughout her youth, Ruth Nixon Huntington was peppered with her mother's efforts to impart universal truths. Ruth called this "the pernicious wisdom of the perpetually disappointed." Since Ruth was reluctant to accept her mother's pearls of wisdom when they were originally offered, she had to learn them for herself. Like any other self-taught wisdom, she never thought to give her mother proper credit. Ruth (like Ruth's mother) believed that she was the first person on Earth to uncover these truths. Although they seemed complicated, the ideas (when they were all boiled down) could be summarized in two simple sentences.

Wisdom: Part 1 & Part 2

1. every life is a battered life, and

2. what is lost is always worth more than what is held

Other than a fleeting feeling of superiority, this wisdom brought very little of value to Ruth's life. She would still look in a mirror and hate her slim figure, hate her new clothes, and hate the freshly painted bedroom walls that surrounded her. Of course, there were always good reasons for this hatred. The slim figure made her look haggard, the clothes were too conceited, and the paint – well, the paint was just better the way it had been before. The list went on from there. Last Christmas dinner was remembered as being better than this one. Last week's weather was just a touch warmer. Or colder or wetter or drier. (Whatever she wanted it to be at the moment.) And, most of all, a child who dies is always more cherished than the one who lives.