I also love the beauty that only Mother Nature can paint, the beauty that can be but attended to by people

Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils

If you are in the “mellowed stage,” or have been around people who are, you’re probably familiar with the term “every now and then,” though you’d be hard pressed to give a surgically clean definition suitable to old school English teachers. True, it didn’t make sense; yet folks knew exactly what it meant… and so, I use it today, and you can look it up.

Every now and then, prodded, I’m sure, by the presidential race, I think about “now” and “then,” the latter describing a period that could stretch as far back as “in the beginning,” and the former, a nanosecond – the way it is, if only for a blink, and the way it was – I do this often, just as when I was a kid. Daddy called it “daydreaming,” a sin when there was real work to be done. Anyway, bike tracks in a patch of newly seeded soil brought it on this time.

The depression, or dent, came from the removal of a mulberry tree thirty or so years ago. Back then, it hadn’t interfered with the fast-growing “imperfect-for-lining-streets,” the cheap “grow-anywhere, send-roots-everywhere, and upend-sidewalk-and-street” trees we’d been “gifted.”

A few years back, the depression deepened, compliments of the water rushing down my formerly lush, sloped lawn, carrying with it the topsoil that seedlings and roots had loosened; and for the past few years I’ve been fighting a losing battle. Now, wee bikers found the depression an added excitement, a safe thrill.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I love children. I’ve taught for years – those in my classroom, at church, and wherever our paths cross. Plus, I’m a grandmother. However, I also love the beauty that only Mother Nature can paint, the beauty that can be but attended to by people.

I’ve been reading The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, this time with older eyes, thus seeing much that is missed with sharper vision that can be pulled away by so many things a lot less important – older eyes… when the mind and the heart are the same age!

These older eyes, in sync with mind and heart, can see into the relationship of my foreparents and the soil, the forty acres! Land, dirt, and everything that comes from it almost scream their value to me! I can feel the anxiety, as well as the promise, of “owning” plots of land – putting one’s sweat and hours and hopes into the soil, working for self, rather than other, knowing that what the land produced would be tied to oneself, would sustain those whose bodies were extensions of their own.

I know I had understood on a level, but out there looking into the little ruts in the dirt, so much more came to me! I thought of the faces, drawn at the mouth, eyes darkened and brows scowled, that likely hold me and others in contempt as we care for the little plot of earth that has our name listed as owner.

If we go but a bit backward, we’d reach a time when the vegetables to feed the children, the grass to beautify the lawn, and the toil to nurture the land was by us, but not for us… and therein lies the pride!

Story Posted:08/18/2016