Nature Girl?
Originally published at KarenVernon.net on October 11, 2020
No one would call me a nature girl. Not the outdoorsy type, I appreciate the natural world, but mostly at a safe and relatively sanitized distance – preferably at an outdoor cafe, beverage in hand, or glued to a beach chair while engrossed in a page-turning novel. But this year has been different.
This year, I’ve spent more concentrated time outside – or on the verge, perched in my little treehouse office – than any other time in memory. This vantage point, though necessitated by the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic and intensified by other life changes, has been nothing short of glorious, and soothing to my soul.
From my perch, I’m literally surrounded by trees and the birds who come to feed and nest there. I’ve become acquainted with the chickadees and finches, the towhees and the cardinals, the hummingbirds and nuthatches. I was there when the bare branches sprouted tiny green buds and then quickly came to full leaf too dense to see through, and now am witness as the first yellow and red kisses of autumn are making their appearance.
At the nearby lake, I delighted in the new batches of ducklings and goslings in the spring. I watched their mamas teach them to swim and then marveled as those babies turned into feisty teenagers, venturing out on their own, and more recently became unrecognizable from their parents’ generation. I welcomed the heron who makes an appearance each late summer, startling me at every sighting with the impossibility of its presence.
This year, on my now more frequent neighborhood walks or just doing routine yard work, I’ve encountered (still from a safe distance) no less than four snakes, when most seasons I see none. I’ve chatted with a little toad – whom we named Todd the Toad – who’s taken up residence in our stone wall, and has now grown to quite a size and seems oddly curious about our comings and goings. I’ve had surprise visits from the bunnies that nest under our porch, and the bears who scavenge in the woods behind the house.
In short, I’ve found myself surrounded by nature, and the cycles of the natural world. Most years, I’d have been working long hours in a corporate office, rarely outside enough to see or notice these things. But for three seasons of this year that has been like no other, they have become my companions, my fellow travelers. They have grounded me in the natural rhythms, and beyond making the heaviness of COVID more bearable, they give me hope.
These woodland creatures don’t know about COVID. They keep moving in their natural cycles, oblivious to our human worries. The leaves sprout, the eggs hatch, the heron follows its migratory calling. The leaves turn, the snake sheds its skin, the bears find a den for their winter’s sleep.
While the world I know has pressed pause, the world they know keeps spinning, the circles of life keep turning. The bulb dormant in the cold becomes the brilliant crocus of spring. The leaf that falls to the ground today becomes a sapling and later a source of shade on a future summer’s day. The duckling of today becomes the patient parent of tomorrow.
Nature knows to take the long view. This pause is but a moment. The disappointment and the loss and the fear, though very real and present with us today, are fleeting. The darkness will not last. Morning will come, and we will rise to welcome it as a long-lost but faithful friend, ready to pick up where we left off.
And yet, I hope, changed in ways we won’t forget.