A lady called up for a little wicker bird cage filled with plants, and Mommy couldn't order one from the wholesalers, because they didn't have any just then. So she took the one she made out to the lady's house to deliver it.

It was too big for the space the lady wanted to fill, so she and Mommy had a little conversation instead, only two hours. The lady was ill and home from work. Her husband had died from cancer months before, and she thought about him all the time.

Mommy told her about me, and they talked about life and death. The lady said, "In Christian Science, we think of death as a moment of transition, just an instant, when the soul leaves the body and enters the eternal and life on the other side of the veil."

Mommy was very, very interested in this lady's idea, and she told her about the angels. Mommy forgot all about the bamboo bird cage until she walked out the door, when they had stopped talking. Then she went back to get it and took it back to sell it later on to a friend who loved the original design.

Another time, she had to take some plants to an address that was very hard to find. She got lost on a little road, Parkway Road, and ended up at a little quaint house. She knocked at the door and, as she did, she saw the most tremendous praying mantis in front of her. Then she looked around and there were dozens and dozens, all praying mantises.

The neat little old lady answered the knock and gave Mommy directions. Then, in answer to the question, she said, "Oh, these praying mantises are always around here. They live around here."

Mommy said, "It must be wonderful to see such beautiful green creatures who never forget to pray. It would be hard to forget to pray when they're around. It's like having a moving, living, green church around you!" The lady agreed, and Mommy left.

I remembered the time in the hospital when Daddy asked me, "Linda, do you know how to pray?" I looked at him, amazed. "Why, don't be silly! Of course, I do. Mommy and I have always prayed together!"

Then there was our little praying pixie. He was ceramic, not alive like the praying mantis, but he prayed all the time too. And, of course, he really did just fold hands for prayer, not like the mantis who prayed and then grabbed everything around it and ate it up.

Mommy read about the mantis later, and it reminded her that sometimes what looks like real prayer isn't really-but only God can know that!

J. Henri Fabre, a French naturalist, studied the praying mantis, and this is what he wrote:

A word on the Praying Mantis, or, as they say in Provence, le Prego Dieu, the "Pray-to-God." Her long, pale-green wings, like spreading veils, her head raised heaven-wards, her folded arms, crossed upon her breast, are in fact a sort of travesty of a nun in ecstasy. And yet she is a ferocious creature, loving carnage.

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