OH, ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL?

The world, this Florida-on-the-Suwannee, late-afternoon world, I mean; all movement and color, gnarled oaks' limbs dipping in the wind. The wind, invisible presence that it is, amazes me. At end of day, from under an electric blanket, I survey the blue and saffron ribbons criss-crossed by the dark lines of the trees' arms against the sky. On my queenly couch 12 ft off the ground, I lie back and watch the day wind down; it has been a day of egg-yolk yellow pansy faces, a raking of pinestraw adn hanging of laundry, stripes of sunlight on the boards of the deck, one small wren pecking at the window after I came in.

Far in the west, the sun lowers itself, inch by inch, toward the forest of the Florida interior that is my horizon. At 6:00 P.M., it illuminates the greens and golds of the stained glass window Mama got from the Alachua Baptists' old yellow brick church when it was torn down in the 70s. Mama's 1918 baptism was the first inside those yellow walls.

Although I grew up in the countryside, my love of the natural world must have been reinforced at First Baptist where I sang songs like "This is my Father's world/I rest me in the thought/Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought."
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Indeed, this evening I couldn't help wondering just how often observers must attribute the invisible stirrings of the wind to God. Years back, a neighbor here on the Suwannee confided that she had prayed Katrina away from us; mmm, I thought, probably shouldn't tell that. What should one tell? How much?

Tonight I'm paying homage to my beginnings, thanking the Baptists for that song I sang so demurely, never picturing hurricanes, alligators, or canebrake rattlers, never realizing I would come to love the power of storms as well or better than placid days of sunshine. But, I do; I love the surprise, the danger, the reminder that I am small, just a part of the whole wide world, a speck in the cosmos. Or is it cosmi? Cosmoses?

My childhood sureness is long gone, but my wonder, my delight in mystery, my curiosity are far more thrilling than I ever could have dreamed, standing next to a window inside the yellow church with gold and green shadows falling over me.