Little Reminders

Whenever we walk down the road to our land I feel an immediate sense of gratitude for nature's abundance. Its tenacity, its relentless overwhelming growth that makes it easy to forget what a perilous state our planet is in. I feel like every time we get frustrated with the overgrown fields that need tending to, the weeds that crawl up the back door of the house, the invasive banana trees that sprout up the day after you cut them back, that Nature is there, standing off to the side, laughing at us. She points her finger and doubles forward with the giggles, saying:

“Don’t you get it? I own you. You people are so deluded. You think you can infest the planet, chewing it up like termites, but I’m stronger. And in the end, I’ll will take you down. So go ahead, cut back the brush, plow under the field, burn down that wasp nest. It doesn’t matter, you might as well go on tilting at windmills.”

And then she commands the weeds to grow faster.

But some days I’m grateful for her displays of prowess.

Like on Wednesday. We walked down our road in the late summer sun, the air thick with blue butterflies and end of the season smells. Those fecund smells that radiate out from the underbrush where the sun can’t get through the trees that have grown top heavy and weighted down with flowers. The smells that drift from cool shadowy places, where dry leaves mix with wet earth and dying vegetation and over-ripe raspberries.

We were stuffing ourselves on those raspberries as we walked down the road, and seeing more just out of reach, I started digging my way further into the brambles when suddenly, I came upon this.

So perfect, so delicate and so beautifully necessary. A completely self-contained miracle.

I called to C and our friends and we stood there in awe before quietly backing away so as not to upset the mother. We were grateful, beholden, and a little more hopeful than before.