JOY ALONG THE WAY: CELEBRATE JUNE'S SPLENDOR

It is that semi-magical time of the year again when the morning sunshine comes through the north windows to illuminate the front room. I say, semi-magic, for fear of ridicule should I say magical. I can hear imaginary voices ridiculing, "What's so magic about sunshine coming through north windows?" It seems a valid ridicule, but semi-magic to me for it happens for such a brief time at my house. No sooner does the sun's rays reach this stage, about two weeks later the sun starts back south again. Indeed, next week. Then my north windows' sunshine is gone.

I know it is the world's turning and not the sun's movement, and that seems like another semi, if not wholly magical thing. You can surely see where the sun rises and sets as it moves along the horizon, but you just as surely can't feel the earth moving.

So I take advantage of the brief north window days to view the world from that angle.

Early in the morning a rabbit comes to nibble at the Dutch clover under the Bradford pear tree. The white hydrangeas bush puts on its show. Sixty years, that hydrangeas has been there, nodding little white fists in the morning breeze. Sometimes an elderberry bush comes up in the middle of it and I let it stay there for a few seasons. Then a pecan tree may try to take over, compliments of the squirrels that ground-stash things all over the place.

When the rabbit has broken its fast, a mother robin, with little ones trailing, will come to seek out the worms or bugs for her brood.

My neighbor's new yellow-gold hibiscus seems to gather in the morning sunshine and hold it fast all day. A drowsy bumblebee bumbles by to inspect this new addition.

This little patch of the earth is a microcosm of June's splendor. Every leaf on the pear tree, the hydrangeas, the hibiscus, the clover stem and every blade of grass have spread themselves widely to the sunshine and rain to manufacture the tremendous energy of chlorophyll, quietly and oblivious to man's meanderings and law-making and law-breaking. Sunshine, rain, soil, seed, chlorophyll -- such complex interworkings, yet such simple results as with all great truths, just food for all living things with the promised production of seed to sustain the ever renewal! A law that man cannot break.

June's new robins and rabbits summarize the continuity and foreverness, the freshness, the beginning again, the wanting to begin again that prompts many to say, as David of old, "Create in me a clean heart, O God."

I manage to get a paint-stuck, sun-splashed window open and the stubborn storm sash up so I can lean out and become more a real part of June, smell the faint sweetness of the clover, near the buzz of the bumblebee, and, on one particular morning, a mockingbird. I thought that song of the mockingbird so early in the morning was rather rare and gathered it, too, was bursting with this knee-deep-in-June thing. It is such a pleasant affliction.

Someone passing by on the street and seeing me leaning out the window, waves. I cannot see who it is but wave back with enthusiasm. It's another sixth month delivery of hoped for goodwill, peace between me and thee, Godspeed.

REJOICE

Jean Bell Mosley lives in Cape Girardeau and is a longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.