Dear Wild Prairie,

How I love to see God work in you. I love to watch Him change and renew you.

On an April morning, I walk between two rusty gate posts into the past. The house once built here by homesteaders is gone. Steps, which a child once sat on to pout lay discarded on their side in the grass. Someday, they will break down and disappear. 

The grass, once kept neat and trim, is waist high. The briars have begun there repossessing of the land. Weeds, wild berry bushes, and milkweed mix with a few enduring domestic plants over the burial ground of the past. 

Small trees have taken root where they will grow unnoticed under the old trees that once held children’s rope swings and  provided shady play space for little girls creating mud pies; shade trees that helped keep the house cool and made a porch into a leafy retreat for family to gather and rest in after a hard day’s work. These big trees will be toppled by wind and time and the small trees will have their day.

 

  

Yucca plants, blue iris, daffodils and daylilies still herald spring here and speak of summer and whisper of the past. Rocks circle a dry pool where little children once clamored, capturing lizards, and frogs on happy carefree afternoons.

A tired housewife laid her baby to sleep in a shaded spot and sat on a slat-backed chair enjoying the quiet time shelling peas for supper. Her husband has taken a trip to town to sell produce from the back of his old truck. Her older daughter is out back pulling weeds in the garden. Maybe a son is busy chopping wood for the winter ahead.