The Nature Preserve

I live in a quiet, peaceful community in southern Maryland, which suits me just fine.  I am not a social person who needs a lot of human companionship.  I am a loner, preferring a slow tempo to life, one in which I have time to think and reflect and tend to my own thoughts.  I rely on my own counsel, having learned over the years that the counsel of others is suspect, sometimes tainted by motives of self-interest rather than selflessness. Whether intended or not, people occasionally project their virtues and faults on you.

This wasn’t always so.  When I was in school I played football, and there is nothing like playing football to make one popular, even when that popularity is undeserved.  I had friends I had never met.  I remember playing a hotly contested, hard fought game, when one of the opposing players lost a contact lens.   There we were, 22 of us wearing helmets outfitted in shoulder pads, hip pads, thigh pads, and cleats, on hands and knees gently probing the grass to see what might turn up.  Why don’t they show photos of that in the local newspaper?  A little camaraderie among combatants.  We made friends with the enemy while looking for a contact lens.  Making friends is easy when you are young.  But as time moves on we learn that one can’t have lots of friends, not really.  Quantity dilutes quality, so we become more selective.  True friends come in small doses, and everyone else becomes acquaintances.

But back to my little niche in life.  

There are trees, bushes, and flowers here and a small nature preserve replete with a bounty of flora and fauna. Lilies, daisies, and other wild flowers fashion a kaleidoscope of color along the asphalt path, while frogs and toads that inhabit the bogs and ponds that pocket the preserve chirp their mating calls.  There are also lots of dragonflies who think nothing of perching on a walker’s shoulder to hitch a ride.  It probably sounds strange, but when a dragonfly alights upon my shoulder I experience a moment of transcendent serenity that is borne out of the delicateness that is its little being.  There it sits, ON ME, resting, diaphanous wings beating ever so slowly.  Some dragonflies have splendid markings.  One species is black and white, yet the mottling of the two colors on the wings is a wondrous sight to behold.  Only nature could turn a smudge into something elegant.

Several times I have almost stepped on a snake or a turtle sunning themselves on the trodden path, and more than once I have turned a corner to come face to face with a deer.  None of these animals flee.  They hold my gaze long enough to acknowledge my presence then return to what they were doing.  There is no need to run.  No one who lives here would harm them, and this lack of threat turns them almost tame.  

But not all is wonderful in nature.

As the summer matures, the biting insects descend upon us turning the most ardent walker into a jogger then a sprinter.  There are gnats that get in your hair onto your scalp and the occasional mosquito who buzz dives your head, but mostly there are flies.  There is the black fly, the bigger fly with a green tint to its thorax, and the fly that has moth-like wings covering almost its entire body, and whose bite is memorable because its slightly venomous sting lasts and lasts.  The wings of these moth flies remind me of the wings of a Valkyrie XP-70 Jet Bomber, only in miniature.  (I had to look that up.)  And I can tell you with unwavering certainty that there is no moment of transcendent serenity when one of these bugs lands on you.  Together — and I am convinced they work together, one diverting your attention, while another darts in for the kill — they are as likely to send you to a fitness club and a treadmill as back home to watch TV or write an entry in a blog.  Where are the dragonflies when you need them?

One time, while riding my bike, I came across a dead Red-Tailed Hawk.  It had fallen from above, most likely touching electric cable and pole at the same time, thereby completing a circuit and ending a life.  The fall was recent, and on my return trip I noticed a second Red-Tailed Hawk standing over the fallen.  There is no way I can tell for sure, but I can’t help thinking that this second hawk was the other’s mate, and I, by thoughtlessly riding past it, was intruding on a private moment where one friend was saying goodbye to another for the last time.  I notched it up a couple of gears and moved on out of there.  A Red-Tailed Hawk, if disturbed and so inclined, can wreak havoc.  That beak and those talons are shredding machines, and we are not built to fend off attacks from above.  When I returned a third time, the mourner was gone, but the corpse remained, now carrion for a host of scavengers.  

Nature is beautiful and unforgiving of mistakes.

They have recently knocked down woods near here to build homes, a community with a 15,000 square-foot association and recreation center.  I’m sure it will be tastefully done, with trees planted five feet from one another, pansies bedded at the entrance, and delightfully designed subdivisions with names like Whispering Pines and Sunken Meadows.  This activity is not close enough to affect me yet, but I see the inevitable coming.  It’s just a matter of time before progress knocks on my front door.  Then nothing will be quiet and peaceful anymore, and the flora and fauna will have retreated to someplace else.  So I am looking for some other place to live.  Woods and a lake would be nice.  Maybe some mountains or compelling hills.  There are places like this still, although it is only a matter of time.  But I have only so much time too, and if I am smart about it, and I plan and do my research well, I will find a place to my liking where my time expires before its does, and that will be good enough.