JOY ALONG THE WAY: YOU CAN'T GET MAD AT NATURE

If we could put a coin in a slot and order up the kind of spring season we wanted, I think this year's type would be the unanimous choice. Have the flowering trees and shrubs been given fertility pills, producing two or three blossoms where heretofore there was only one? I think, too, we might start calling our town the City of Bradford Pears instead of the City of Roses. The pears have made a veritable fairyland of our city.

I can readily understand Edna St. Vincent Millay's lines, "O World, I cannot hold thee close enough." She speaks widely of skies, and mists, autumn trees and bluffs. Right now I cannot hold close enough the lilacs, the autumn olive, the viburnum, although I try, gathering up great bunches of them and burying my nose therein for long moments. Sweet, sweet nature.

Even when we have floods, earthquakes and fires we can't get mad at nature or the laws of nature. There is no malice there. Only humans have malice toward humans. Wild and domestic animals have instincts.

If lightning strikes a tree, who can you get mad at? The Creator? I think nature, given enough time, does a great job in making repairs to damages of its own making, or of man's making. Man can cut down acres of forest land and if he doesn't keep cutting, it will become a forest again. The acid-killed trees in the Northeast would reforest if man's acid would stop. Even long before this problem in the Northeast there was the melting glacier moving southward, leaving all those stones on the countryside. But look how nature has repaired that bleak, rocky scene, made it a tourist attraction.

We human beings just aren't wired for the slowness of these long-term repairs, although, in some cases, it is not so long. I know of a place where an old rusty, worn-out piece of farm machinery was left in a field, abandoned. I've watched it slowly deteriorate, but I've also watched the wild vines come to put a green cover over it, even make it a mound of blooming trumpet flowers and morning glories in the summertime.

You can't get mad at the dandelions for they have no malice toward you. You can't get mad at the blue jay that keeps pecking away at your house gutter and eventually building a nest there, clogging your drain, backing up water that eventually leaks through a roof seam, staining the ceiling. Your madness wouldn't be understood by the blue may and whatever you are mad at you want that thing to know it!

Among the thousands of other things that nature does to repair its own damages and to make things pretty and pleasant for us, I think the winner this spring is a little house finch's nest constructed on a door wreath of a pretty, little, new, blue house.

Five tiny blue eggs to go along with the color scheme! It is like a Good Housekeeping stamp of approval for the new home and a calling card left by Nature's Welcome Wagon. May all the little eggs hatch and new birds go to some other houses next year to create a happy circumstance. Put up a door wreath and wait for nature to add the finishing animated touches.

REJOICE

Jean Bell Mosely is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.