When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time in the woods, which were full of treasures for me. At night I lined them up on my bed: fat flakes of mica, buckeyes bigger than shooter marbles, blue jay feathers, bird bones and if I was lucky a cicada shell, one of those dry brown bug bodies you can find on tree trunks when the 17-year locusts come out of the ground. I liked them for at least two reasons. First, because they were horrible looking, with their huge empty eye sockets and their six sharp little claws. By hanging them on my sweater or better yet in my hair, I could usually get the prettier, more popular girls at school to run screaming away from me, which somehow evened the score.

I also liked them because they were evidence that a miracle had occurred. They looked dead, but they weren't. They were just shells. Every one of them had a neat slit down its back, where the living creature inside of it had escaped, pulling new legs, new eyes, new wings out of that dry brown body and taking flight. At night I could hear them singing their high song in the trees. If you had asked them, I'll bet none of them could have told you where they left their old clothes.

That is all the disciples saw when they got to the tomb on that first morning two piles of old clothes.