Beech Tree News Network

“We have a fortune lying around in our front yard,” I told Garey one morning, as I held up a small stick for him to examine.

               “What is that?” he asked.

               “It’s a stick,” I said.

               “I know it’s a stick,” he said, “but why is it worth a fortune?”

               “It belongs to a six-stick set that came in a bag of toys I got the kittens for Christmas,” I explained.

               It continues to amaze me when I see things for sale that occur naturally on our farm.  Wreaths made from wild grapevine, small balls made from willow branches—the same branches that litter our front yard after a breezy afternoon—cow manure, dirt, bundles of kindling, as well as the afore-mentioned sticks in the kittens’ toy bag.

               If you take a walk out on our farm, you will spot large grasses with wispy seed heads, the same grasses you’ll find dried and for sale at Hobby Lobby.  Great long pods of crimson okra, drying on their stalks in the fall, show up in flower arrangements.  Bags of pinecones, seashells and rocks wait on shelves of craft stores for someone to take them home and create a facsimile of a world in which they no longer live.

               We, as a people, started selling nature when we moved away from it.  Literally away from it.  I am not being smug about this because I live on a farm.  There was a period of time when I lived in a city, albeit a small city.  I love the convenience of city living, but there is something in me that calls me back to nature. 

               When I moved to Bowling Green in 1973 to attend WKU, I lived in an apartment near the campus.  I didn’t have a car, and there were no parks within walking distance.  Looking back, I realize now that some of the depression that overwhelmed me during that time was caused by the absence of nature.

               In 1974, after Garey and I met, he would take me for drives in the country.  I will never forget one particular drive in the fall with all the colors on every side of me.  I remember how aggravated Garey got with me, because I was so caught up in the scenery, and I wasn’t listening to him.

               “Look at that one!” I would say, then, “Oh, look at that one,” as we rounded a bend in the road.

               “Cheryl, I’m trying to tell you something!” Garey would say, exasperated at my short attention span.

               “Sorry,” I would say, not saying anything else…out loud, but continuing the conversation inside my head.

               I think being out in nature helps me, because nature understands.  There is very little I have experienced that nature hasn’t.  Animals have lost their homes to fire, wind and water.  They have lost their offspring to all manner of death.  Mothers have abandoned their young for no apparent reason, and babies have become orphans, losing their mothers to traps or guns or other animals. They have been both the hunted and the hunter.

               The large trees lift their branches to the sky.  Beneath them, small trees struggle to get sunlight.  Vines twist and tangle around them, causing the wood to be gnarled and bent and deformed.  Fire burns them alive, and water suffocates their roots. 

               We like to think of nature as a quiet place to walk and breathe and be alone with our thoughts, and it is, but only because nature doesn’t speak English or Spanish or Norwegian.  Nature shouts in a language we can’t understand or more likely groans, like the verse in Romans declares. 

  It is understandable that nature is big business.  We want to bring it into the house with us, hang it on our front porch, on our walls and our doors.  Nature is the original template, and the original is always better than the imitation.