Just leave it
I awoke this morning to the beeping and blinking sound of plows scraping down our street for what seemed like to too-manyth time this winter. I could not help myself: Why can't they just leave it?
It's just snow. Why don't we just slow down a little, take a hint from the plants and trees and accept that things are just different in the winter. Maybe we sleep a little longer, work a little slower, sing a little softer. I was thinking about the severity of snow. It actually appears to cause a panic attack to the inanimate object that is "authority", it is heartburn for superintendents and cocaine for news-reporters. It's just snow, a little frozen water which fell, beautifully, and absolutely appropriately for a late February day in the Northern Hemisphere.
Why can't they just leave it? It gets picked up and hauled off in giant piles as though the ground doesn't need it. The irony leaves a bitter taste in summer when one watches the sprinkler system splashing water back on these very grounds that had every drop in frozen form salted, scraped, shoveled and dumped elsewhere only a few months before.
I imagined what my own yard would look like if I borrowed neighbor Bill's little snowblower and removed all the snow, piling it up on the street to be shoveled off, or to melt and run down the concrete, picking up particles of dirt and leaves, taking away the natural nutrients offered by the trees and the sky. I thought back to those 3 weeks of dry, warm weather this past summer. Wasn't it glorious? BBQs could go off without a hitch, you always knew what to wear, poor plants could not catch a break. The lucky ones got a sprinkle from the watering can, others never recovered.
Why can't they just leave it? I guess we would never recover, the economy would fail, families would never get to go on vacation, teachers would have to spend all year with students forced to find inventive ways to engage pupils in every season, every weather, every natural and artificial catastrophy. So...why can't they just leave it?
I pitched the question to myself and this Body of Water project: why can't we just leave it? Why should this be a big deal? Be addressed, have urgency? Why can't we just let every landowner, renter, gardener, institution just do what works for their economic, personal, and vacation planning needs.
We have been looking deeply into the language of the project, in the information being offered to participants and attendees to take away with them, to guide them through the work. Our water has become water belongs to all life. If we cannot consider water and the land on which is falls, flows, seeps and returns through evaporation, are we really thinking for comprehensively and for our community? How strongly does the environment itself feature as a member of the community when individuals, schools, families, cities, counties, states, and nations plan for their future, or is it still considered that problem that needs addressing, that needs arguing about as to whether it should have a voice or not.
This is where I went when the blinking plows scrapped up the street this morning, to the snow, this advanced gift to hopefully give us a balanced summer both for the garden plants, longevity of the trees down the boulevards, our BBQs, farmers, and boaters. It is always going to be difficult to decide who should leave it, but maybe if we widen our scope, solutions will float to the surface.
I've leave it there for now.
