A boy and his bugs

Dear son,

Yesterday at lunch you prayed such a beautiful prayer. You thanked Jesus for a long list of things, including our family, your new school, and the “good watermelons” we hauled home last week from the field of a kind friend. You love eating watermelon so much that you begged us to grow it in the garden this year. You monitored the progress of the vines and rejoiced when small fruit began to appear. And you were the first to notice how the vines had withered; you dragged me out to the garden, telling me the plants needed water, and we discovered a thousand white squash bugs had beaten us to our watermelons.

This plague of squash bugs on your watermelon vine is rather ironic, because if there is anything you love almost as much as watermelons, it is bugs. You have become a man after your father’s heart this summer, catching and freezing and identifying and pinning insects, building your own insect collection. Our freezer door is stuffed with plastic containers full of dead insects. And after you decided to start collecting insects, your older sister joined in, too, leading to wearisome arguments about who gets to keep the katydid, the dragonfly, the walking stick, the cicada.

Truth be told, I didn’t know that I would be growing a family of naturalists. When I married your daddy, he was recent chemistry major, a scientist of a different stripe, and it was only after an unexpected twist in his graduate school journey that he landed in a lab of chemical ecologists and became an entomologist. That much was a surprise, but looking back, his passion was always present. Your daddy has always been attentive to the tiniest details of the natural world, a lover of small and beautiful things. On a recent hike, I walked quickly down the path and over the stream, lugging the water and snacks, looking up at the trees and sky. And your daddy walked slowly behind me, camera in hand, looking down and stopping to document every exquisite mushroom he found along the way.

I know this, now, how there are worlds within worlds. How another person’s view is a world unto itself—I look up, and your daddy looks down, and we see very different things as we journey together.

I wondered this week, as you stood at the bottom of the driveway, waiting for the big yellow school bus to come down the road, what the view from your five-year-old heart is. You are so much like your daddy: attentive and smart, meticulous and neat, graceful and lithe, kind and good-natured. You have your father’s tenderness, his patience, and his large brown eyes. And you’ve grown up so much this past year. The boy we took to Tanzania struggled to make himself known and cried easily when hurt or frustrated. But the boy I’ve watched climb walls and trees this summer is made of a stronger substance than I knew. Recently I watched you take a tumble, and when I asked if you were okay, you popped up with a smile and said, “Of course I’m okay. I’m strong. I’m tough. I’m flexible!”

And so you are.

Dear boy, I pray that you will be able to hold in tension your tenderness and your toughness. The world needs strong men, but it also needs men who are patient and kind and attentive to small and beautiful things. This is the strength I see in you as I watch you catch a butterfly between your nimble fingers, as you tenderly hug your small sister.

The prophet Isaiah once wrote that in the sight of God—from the point of view of heaven’s throne—we’re all grasshoppers. You and me, and the whole human race, we’re as plentiful as those squash bugs… and even more precious than those watermelons. We are small and we are significant; we are brittle and we are beloved. We are loved by a God who is both strong and gentle, and who calls us to be like Him.

May it be so!

With love,
Your mom