Torn Handkerchiefs

The pale blue sky was filled with thin, ragged clouds which pulled apart like cotton wool. 

A perfect spring morning. No wind, the sun was out and shining brightly on a dewy landscape as Dusty and I rounded behind the woods. The birds trilled their joyful songs.

We walked. We prayed. And then we stopped, soaking in the beauty of the rough field before us. For between most thistles and thorns, weeds and saplings, stretched gossamer strands of webs spun by millions of spiders. Each web was picked out in droplets of dew and sparkled in the sunlight. 

A torn carpet of moisture mirroring the torn canopy in the sky above.

I smiled as I remembered a scene of moist tissue sprinkled across the lawn and raining down from the trees of our home when I was a teenager. Friends had ‘toilet-papered’ my house the night before – a fun way of marking friendship in those long-ago days of innocence – but my Dad had not been impressed. He ill-advisedly took the hose to the strands of toilet paper which laced through the trees and blew gently in the breeze, bringing down millions of tight balls of wet tissue onto the grass which I then spent the next few weeks raking up every day. 

Fun memories of innocence, of adolescence, and even of my dad’s temper.

I thought of torn handkerchiefs, and remembered the tree outside of a tomb in Cyprus which was adorned with a myriad of torn hankies, each representing a heartfelt prayer offered to God at this holy man’s memorial site. 

A myriad of spiders’ webs, picked out in glistening dewy drops, offering a paean of praise to the loving Creator God.

What better way to start the day?