Mud and Memory in Spring
The world isn't a thing to be observed, it is a place in which to live. To love and to thrive, making food sweeter, campfires brighter and laughter richer.
Everything is better in spring. The birds are more cheerful. The turtles all have smiles. The cows are happier. There’s something attractively bucolic about these bovine denizens this morning. Standing in clumps with their heads down chomping the fat green grasses. We are only weeks away from the heat and the water dearth of summer but they have no idea. Or, at least they aren’t conscious of it. No doubt Jehovah designed it into their instincts to eat hay while the sun shines.
I am with my wife’s family this morning as we are out preaching. She is absent having had an uncomfortable night that prevented her from sleeping. Too bad. The weather is simply perfection. Cool and breezy with an abundance of sunshine. We are in the country and the grasses are doing that thing I love so much: waving like a soft ocean, inviting me to sail away.
The girls are in the back seat, heads in phones giggling to each other over silly filters applied to self-portraits. My brother-in-law drives today. He is naturally quiet, so our conversation is minimal unless I punctate the silence with some comment on a breath-taking view or small exciting thought.
This morning we meet only older men in this rural area in the shadow of the Air Force base. They have beautiful rolling hills for lawns that require long two-track driveways. Seas of bluebonnets with islands of Indian paintbrushes and lots of mud. Both byproducts from the recent storms.
My final conversation is with a very gregarious aviation electronics engineer who has purchased the old 4J spread and is mid-remodel on the ranch-style house. He regales us with tales of the T-38 (a training jet) and something he calls ‘the prop job’ and explains that the military is purchasing new, larger airframes to train the thirty or so NATO nation pilots who come here from all over Europe. And that much of the land I’m waxing poetic about will soon be purchased for a major expansion of this training base.
The war, it seems, is good for business.
When I shift the conversation to spiritual matters, he remembers he was in the middle of an important matter and excuses himself. Too bad, we have a lot of common interests over which I think we could connect.
Driving home, our attention turns to the river snaking through town. Normally a lazy, shallow channel of chocolate, it is now a wide rushing gorging channel of chocolate. Redder than usual and scheduled to crest sometime tonight. We had a record amount of rain last month with ten and a half inches. Most of it this week. Having spilled its banks, we comment on what has not yet been touched: the visitors center, the campground, the neighborhoods.
I am thinking of the sidewalks and my job with the city 30 years ago. I was a parks department plumber, meaning I fixed broken things and installed new irrigation systems for the parks. It was a great gig. I was learning all the time and I was young enough and eager enough that I didn’t mind the cold in winter the heat in the summer or the mud or finding skunks and rattlesnakes.
Dust Meridian has made it a decades-long project to built an eight-foot wide ribbon of concrete circling the town for people to recreate. A twenty five mile long park corridor. It’s very nice for a stroll or bike ride, even a picnic in many places. About half of it parallels the muddy red river which makes for a surprisingly pleasant time all year long. Every spring those miles of path go underwater.
When they recede, all of the minerals that give the water its distinctive color (red) are deposited in a thick carpet on the trails. In some places it may be three or four inches deep. This happened a few times each spring and the only way to address it is to have every hand in the parks department out for a week or so scraping away mud and then power washing the whole thing.
The workers drive upgraded golf carts with plastic plows attached to the front. Today they call them side-by-sides and they now have big grippy tires and louder engines. Two teams pass down the path pushing the still wet mud off to the side, then a third crew comes behind with brooms and power washers to scrub it clean.
Those weeks I always considered a boon. They were a nice break from the monotony of digging holes and tracing where leaks were coming from. It was work, but it felt like a vacation. Especially if you got a team of people you enjoyed being around. Sometimes you didn't.
It is really amazing how quickly the environment can reclaim what man conquers. I think that if humans moved away for merely 10 years, this place would be trees and grass everywhere punctuated with crumbling structures. In a hundred, all you would see is lumps of rubble.
In the coming days, I'll keep my eye out for those little crews doing the work that keeps all that concrete clean and useful.
What a thought: the world in its natural state.
But imagine if man could wield all of this power and ingenuity he clearly has and instead of destroying the environment, crafted it to its fullest potential? Enhancing. Increasing. Making the total more than the sum of its parts. Like an artist choosing which colors to place next to each other, our world would become a masterpiece. Not by accident or through random action, but by design and with intent.
Let's throw away the playbook on profit and cost and just make decisions based on what's best. Time, always a factor, gets stretched into decades and centuries. Money, an idiotic construct, gets put aside and instead humanity cooperates and trusts one another to do their best. Many hands making the work light and the world better.
But, to get there we need to abolish greed and stinginess. Laziness and indifference. That is our mission this morning. To be the change we wish to see in the world. And we are. Nothing grand has shifted. But we put one more drop into the bucket of making our world over.
Better.
New.
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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