Labor day Lamentations

My wife Anna and I were sitting on the new porch of the artist’s studio we have been building in our back field for the last eight months, savoring, on Friday night of Labor Day weekend, our happiness with the craftsmanship of our carpenter friend Bill Scheurich and trying to figure where to route some brick pathways amidst the landscape plants.

As dusk descended upon us, we heard the buzz of mosquitoes and started to slap. Suddenly a faint scratchy sound caused us both to look out into the overgrown field to see black winged dragonflies doing acrobatic dips and curls toward us. I marveled at their tight maneuvers under the porchlight as they chased their prey. Anna said that Doris Leeper, a now departed environmentalist/artist friend of ours who lived in remote Eldora, south of Turtle Mound in New Smyrna Beach, had once told her that dragonflies are also called “mosquito hawks”. This nickname seemed apropos as more than thirty of them swarmed just off the porch ledge gulping mosquitoes in their aerial gyrations.

After this wondrous outdoor stage show, an encore was presented as several fireflies cast periodic light beacons repeatedly around the edge of the field. We were reduced to murmurs as we watched the quiet display and talked of our childhoods each raised on farms in Pennsylvania and Canada respectively, where fireflies had been in abundance and barefoot childhood summers had seemed absolutely endless.

Later I thought of the relatedness of all the species in this divine symphony called Nature. We had a problem with moles in our lawn grass burrowing everywhere creating topographical roadmaps in the yard. I had thought about calling a pest control company to kill them with poisons or gas or something but kept hesitating as we had rarely used toxic treatments on our property in twenty-five years. We thought area insecticides killed good insects like ladybugs and butterflies as well as bad guy bugs. So I waited.

Just last week, Anna pointed out that the mole tunnels were gone and she had seen black snakes or “rat snakes” around. The kind that go into
tunnels and burrows. So they had wiped out my aggravation, the moles.

Since then, the owls have come periodically for a few nights and dined on the snakes as well as field mice flushed out by recent rains.
So I pondered the inter-relatedness of it all as I imagined all the wetlands and streambeds in West Volusia now swelled like a sponge with daily summer rains. I thought of all the houses being flooded in communities south of us because housebuilders and planners allowed
marshes and supposedly dry lakebeds to be filled for more and more house construction.

I wondered whether municipal elected officials who constantly support road construction and sprawling shopping center development in the name of “economic development” aren’t perhaps, to paraphrase Scripture, gaining monetary tax wealth but losing their citizens’ souls in the process.

Maybe the ongoing recurring Original Sin is our separation from Nature. As the Book of Genesis says, Mankind has been given “dominion” over all the other animals and species of the world.

Does this mean “stewardship” and some constructive attempt at “co-existence’ and “management” because we spiritually sense our endowed responsibility as God’s overseer or does this mean ‘domination’ and ‘destruction’, because of our separation from God and Nature. Our arrogant hubris could be evidenced as residential overcrowding, congested traffic, miles and miles of asphalt and pollution over a corporate logo fast food anonymous landscape where West Volusia scenery becomes indistinguishable from the highway horizons
of Orlando or Jacksonville.

I’m going back to the porch chair with a view of the back field and listen to the clicking hum of the dragonflies mix with the
not so distant buzz of Interstate 4. Whatever.