JOY ALONG THE WAY: NOTHING DISAPPEARS FOREVER; ONLY CHANGES AND RENEWS

The weather vane was gryating furiously, the windchimes going balistic and hanging pots of petunias swinging like pendulums at 150 arcs.

Apprehensive by past years of dread, I automatically looked in the direction of neighbor Richard's mighty American elm which, for long years, was a leaning catastrophe about to happen. How pleased I was to see and remember that the catastrophe had happened last year. The damaging fall had occurred, was over, done, zippo, that last limb and twig long ago hauled away.

I eye canvassed the premises to assess what other things had been done to repair the damage of that year-ago afternoon. Four sections of the ornamental lattice fence had been replaced. They stood sturdy and firm as the current wind rattled and roared all about me. The smashed, wooden, big bird feeder had been replaced with a metal one. There was a cardinal at the feeding station, calmly de-hulling a sunflower seed, even as the wind blew his tail feathers back over his body. "This wind can't be too bad," I told myself, watching the bird while holding windblown hair out of my eyes.

I looked at where, twelve months ago, a prized pink rose bush in the flower border had been thoroughly destroyed by major limbs twisted from the big oak. There was a brave little rose bush that had come up this spring from the roots -- the roots upon which that prized pink rose had been grafted. The blooms on this resurrected rose were single petaled and red, the color of blood, as if it were still bleeding from a year-old wound.

Although I couldn't see it from my position, I knew the bare spot in the front lawn had been repaired and was even now seeded and sodded. The city's clawed machine that removed the mountain of fallen limbs had taken one bite too deep and left the scalped depression.

The current fury continued to roar like some mad animal. I was afraid to go look at the Bradford pear that had been blown down in a prior year. It, too, had come up from alien roots as had the rose bush.

Where a robin's nest, complete with baby robins, had been blown out of the oak tree last May, a this year's robin had built a nest in almost the same spot and it was now wildly rock-a-bying.

All this nature repairing of itself made me think how awesome were the living things that could do this. But then, what is not living? The wind? The rain? The air? The ground?

Water renews itself constantly, coming down from the clouds, it evapores, turns into steam, fog or vapor, is caught up in the clouds again where it comes down again as rain, changed, but still water. Did it not live and renew itself? The atoms that make the soil, are they pears and grass, only to turn into atoms of soil again, constantly moving. Alive. Even rocks that appear so dead turn into sand and eventually silt. So the rock has life.

The furious anniversary wind eventually stops. The trees are stilled. The robin flies from her unmoved nest in search of food. The whole living world with its dancing atoms moves on. Nothing dies, Only changes and renews.