3. A spider who built its web in the woodshed doorway

Spiders go right to work making new webs, but Mom told me robins sometimes move into an empty nest. I don’t know about us. Can we be happy like a robin in a new nest, or are we like the ants I disturbed, going in circles trying to find a way back into their broken tunnels?

I point to the middle of the glittery stream.

“That’s where our house used to be. Right there. My father was going to build a porch on in the spring. So Mom could cook down the sap even when it rained.”

“All gone,” Birdie sings out again, throwing one pebble after another into the water. “Swam away. All gone. Swam away.”

“That’s right, Birdie, our house is gone,” I say. I think she might also be talking about Lilygirl, but I don’t want to remind her of her lost duck.

“All gone.” She doesn’t sing the words this time but says them very seriously.

Dr. Morgan stares at the water that covers our house, and the swirls of green and yellow currents.

“I’m sorry, Henry, that you lost your childhood home. I left mine by choice and I still miss it. But this”—the curator gets right up to the edge of the water—“this is a sight I haven’t seen in fifty years. In Nottingham, they dubbed it rainbow water. There were those who claimed it was a fabrication and those who saw the colors clearly. In the midst of the arguments, the colors vanished, never to be seen again. I speculate that the minerals that made the colors were diluted over time.”

“What colors were there?”

“Yellows and greens, as well as flashes of red.”

“My friend James says it’s good we have a stream now. He wants us to build a raft.”

“Your mate James is certainly an optimist.”

I never heard the word “optimist” used about anyone before. I like that there’s a word to explain James’s one hundred percent.

“My bedroom faced out toward the big field. When I heard the strange noise, I went up on the roof. That’s where I was when the rock landed. Dr. Morgan, what did the other scientists say when you told them about the water rock?”