The Spider and the Toad

“I don’t know whether to eat breakfast at Manor, Palentrie or La Recre,” My housemate said.
I was already on the computer to get stuff done before my physio and radio today.
She mentioned a few more things… visions of croissants danced in my head.
“Ok, I agreed, “You want company?”
“We need to celebrate your first day of radio,” she said.
As we approached the garage, we saw that a spider was spinning her web. In the sunlight the tiny, tiny strings glistened like opals.
“Do you want a photo?” I asked. She rushed back into the house, but the normal garage background lost the beauty of the web. “What if I get a paper to hold up behind it?” I rushed into the house and came back with both white (it hid the light) and blue paper. As I lifted the blue, I caught one of the strings, undoing the work of the poor spider.





Speed backward to my youth: on summer evenings my family would sit on our porch and catch up with the days’ events. My brother and I would catch fireflies.
A toad would appear and eat the insects that were zapped by the light we always left on.
One day my grandmother saw our toad (how she knew it was our toad, I’m not sure) was being swallowed by a snake. My mother—not deathly afraid of snakes like my grandmother—ran to the garage and found a tool and chopped the snake into several pieces.
The toad started to hop away when my mother tripped and crushed it to death making one think when it is the time to go, fate steps in.
And we suspect my grandmother had identified the toad correctly, because no toad ever appeared again to clear our porch of insects.