blue blue blue

It's beautiful here this morning. Cool and bright. And yet I am so sad. Discouraged. Ravages from my beloved river. And not the river's fault: we put the damned bridge in, the river is only trying to cope. I'd had such high hopes in moving here: to change my life so that I did less damage, was more invisible to Mother. And I look at the mess across the road, and up-river from the bridge and my heart is near to breaking. If we removed the bridge right now, this minute, it would still take Mother millennia to repair what we've done. If we had thousands and thousands of $, we could help some, but just *some* ~~

And the damage just since this land was subdivided. The slash from the original road molders under banks of blackberries, as does the additional slash from putting in the electrical lines. Survivors of the original logging, the Hemlocks are dying. While we didn't cause the Woolly Adelgid, we seem unable to stop it.

Yes. I know. The road would have been built had I not come. And the electric poles would have gone in had I not come. And the bridge would have been built without me, had I not come. And the Woolly Adelgid, that absurd bug disguised as a piece of lint would still be ravaging my beloved Hemlocks.

And yet I think with what joy I came. How carefully I built (no heavy equipment to compress roots, carefully sculpting the house around trees. Earning indeed my local rep as that "crazy tree lady" ~~ and how proud I was of that, lol! ). How eagerly I scouted out the new flowers, trees, leaves, bugs, snakes that came to my living space among the trees. The Great Blue Heron who kept me company several times for morning coffee, the pair of Mallards near the spring inlet after a flood, just looking for a quiet spot to rest, The Beautiful Ludmilla, a spicebush swallowtail, who consented to be my pet for a week, performing her mating dance on the green speckled lid of my cook pot. No wonder I named it What Joy Farm. But now, excepting Ludmilla's beautiful get, none seen here for long.

I have no answer. If I have failed, as hard as I've tried to do no harm, what then of those who don't even care? Who just see the whole earth as "stuff" to be used up by them, as their God-given right?

Sorry for the downer. Pray for the river banks, pray for the Hemlocks, pray for us all.