I’d like to introduce myself as your moderator here by telling you about the beautiful location in which I am blessed to be situated, where I can enjoy nature simply by walking out my door. I live 13 miles north of Battle Creek (yes, the Battle Creek) in rural Barry County Michigan. Barry County holds the distinction of being the county with the highest proportion of wetlands in the entire state of Michigan. (In other words, we have a lot of swamps around here, which unfortunately means we also have a lot of mosquitoes. But we must take the bad with the good on this old earth, right?) Yankee Springs State Recreation Area, located not far from us, contains perhaps the only peat bog in Michigan, though I can’t say that for sure. I have been into the bog, but have not hiked the Devil’s Soupbowl, also in Yankee Springs.
Our house is small by today’s standards, but it’s big enough for us, and the location more than makes up for any shortage of room. The back of our 2 ½ acres is bordered by a creek, the banks of which are abundant with quaking aspen, staghorn sumac, and wild raspberry. If you look closely at the area, you will also find wild grapevines twining among the trees. We mow only the front acre, allowing the “back 40” to grow wild, so we can enjoy the many wildflowers – goldenrod, sweet pea, black-eyed Susan, and many others in their seasons. Our clay soil creates flooding problems in our yard, but that has its positive side also. This year, we had enough rain that our yard remained flooded the entire summer, and by August, the appearance of some attractive wetland plants that had never grown there before rewarded our inconvenience. (Oops! Purple loosestrife is supposed to be a bad guy, but it sure was pretty!) Besides, the nearest mating pair of mallards has occasionally decided to spend some time on our temporary pond during past early spring mornings, where we were able to enjoy them for quite some time through the large bedroom window at the end of the hall.
While our property is located right on busy M-37 Highway, the main trucking route between Battle Creek and Grand Rapids, we are at its intersection with a very little-used country dirt road. This is where I walk every day. Just past our creek, there is a house on either side of the road, then not another one until the next intersecting road, a whole mile away! This first mile passes between fields, then through woods containing a good-sized pond or two, some years. I make a left turn at that next road, where my second mile passes through meadow and wetlands. There are more houses along that mile, but most are far enough from the road, and hidden by trees, to remain unnoticed. Sometimes I can walk the entire 2 miles out and back, without meeting so much as a single motor vehicle, though usually I’ll encounter a few. But they are people who live along the road, who have come to recognize me in the 2 years that I have been walking this road daily, and most of them wave at me.
Last year, to celebrate our 20th anniversary, my husband and I traveled to Kentucky, where we visited relatives he hadn’t seen since he was a child, and spent entire days hiking the foothills and touring Mammoth Cave. I took somewhere between 6 and 10 rolls of film of the incredible natural beauty I saw there, yet when I returned to my own place, I looked around me with a new appreciation for my own corner of the earth, which is every bit as beautiful, in its own way.
I hope you have enjoyed this description of my home area. Now I would like to hear from the rest of you nature lovers. Please tell all of us about the place where you are blessed to enjoy nature most often.
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The Lord is the strength of my life and my portion forever.
Oops! Where would I be without the aide of my computer geek sons to tell me what I did wrong?!
[This message has been edited by Cathy Sears (edited June 04, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Cathy Sears (edited August 24, 2001).]
