IF THE TREES COULD TALK

I was in my parent's woods today. That place of countless adventures I had as a kid.  I marveled standing there at the sights, the sounds, the trees, weeds, and logs.  There was no order to the woods.  The trees grew where they could get sunlight.  The weeds took up residence where they willed with one to pull them out.  The decaying underbrush or fallen tree just laid there, no one to necessarily clean it up. The disorderlyness strangely, was just as it should have been. No doubt stuff has grown and died over these many years, yet there was a familiarness like meeting an old friend separated from me for years.  I adventured there a lot as a kid.  The woods lay just through the pasture and field behind our barn.  In my younger exploring years we had cows in the pasture.  I loved to take my shoes off in the summer and run through the cow pasture en route to the woods.  Yes, you heard me - purposefully and freely through piles of cow manure, some still warm and fresh.  Why did I do that?  I don't know other than as a kid you have virtually no sense of ickiness, bacteria or even really disgusting.  It was absolutely wild and freeing.  Basically, it was farm fun.  City kids just wouldn't quite get it.   I smiled inwardly in the woods today introducing my husband and granddaughters to a place of deep peace, memory and experiences for me.  I did just what I did as a kid, imagined that the trees were magical and kind.  That they sort of smiled a gentle smile when folks enjoyed their world.  As I knelt by the outdoor makeshift grill my dad erected with cement blocks and various old grill parts, I saw the insect world.  Without people constantly intruding, they were free to live falling prey only to animals or birds or frogs who were higher up on the food chain.  I saw God in this place.  I knew that even though years had passed, choices had been made, life had been lived, God was still in those trees.  He was still the same.  He still whispered to me through the light filtering down through the trees.  The wheat field had been harvested and all that remained was a golden stubble.  The corn now well above my head flanked both sides of the ruts back to the woods.  I heard the locusts in the trees ushering in mid July and early August.  I remembered what a great life I had growing up - the magic of nature and God that I witnessed on a farm.  I remembered and felt it all over again today.