Okay, so, I had never seen a pedestrian detour sign before
this morning.
And honestly, this one looked like it had been Frankenstein’ed
together with pieces of other signs.
But there it was, greeting me at the corner on a foggy
morning.
The detour didn’t affect me, but my natural rebelliousness
made me very tempted to walk down the forbidden sidewalk—a sidewalk that was
quiet and empty and pristine first thing this morning.
But taking forbidden paths seemed like something out of a
fairy tale and one that certainly didn’t end well for Little Red Riding Hood or
Hansel and Gretel.
So, I stuck to my usual loop, even if the fog wound up
causing a detour for my plans for the day.
I am, maybe embarrassingly, a true creature of habit, bound
to a daily routine and left floundering and restless and put-out when something
disrupts that routine.
Today, I had to wait for the fog to lift before I could go
to the Wetlands.
It was agony.
I felt like a kid having to wait for my parents to wake up
on Christmas morning.
I ran errands to CVS and Walmart.
Still the fog persisted.
I took time to weed through the closet and dispose of two
garbage bags of old clothes.
Still the fog hovered, retreating a bit from the roads, but
clinging to the trees and fields.
The delay was killing me.
Was this the beginning of my Lenten penitence?
The Wetlands were going to be filled with out of state bird
watchers who hog the entire one-way road there.
Perhaps a few strategically placed detour signs might help.
Finally, the fog lifted, and I headed to the Wetlands a full
two hours later than normal.
But the sky was blue.
And the clouds lazy and wispy, vanishing quietly in the sun.
The road at the Wetlands was filled with bird watchers and I
did my best to avoid any road rage or cause someone else’s road rage,
especially when I stopped to follow a three-foot gator that was moving,
hungrily and anxiously through the grass.
Every time I moved the car, he stopped.
Every time I stopped, he moved.
Again and again, we played this game as if he thought, like
a child playing peek-a-boo, that he could turn himself invisible if he just
held still.
Or maybe, I thought, we were playing out that scene from Jurassic Park where Dr. Grant warns Ian
Malcolm about the T-rex.
“Don’t move,” he says.
“Their vision is based on movement.”
Only in this case, I had become the T-rex, the threat that
this small gator was trying to avoid.
I don’t like to stress out the animals so I moved on and past
a squawking Great Blue Heron upset with another larger gator that must have
been circling below but vanished before I could get its picture.
I checked on three Great Blue Heron nests. With so many babies last year failing to
thrive, with so many abandoned nests, I am anxious for each nest I check. As long as the mama is still in the nest,
though, even if I can’t see the baby, we should be all right. She won’t stay if the babies are dead.
Two of the nests had one baby each.
The one nest that has attracted the most paparazzi still had
three screaming, beautifully-lunged, babies.
Despite arriving two hours later than normal, and despite having
to navigate the crowds, I saw many amazing, wonderful things this morning.
From a posing, Monarch butterfly …
To alligators both in and out of the water.
So many gators in fact that I had to stop driving in the
grass to get around cars lest I run over an unseen gator.
The other day, as I pulled into the Wetlands, I said a quick
prayer to God and asked that He show me whatever it was that I needed to see
there. I wasn’t going to make requests
for Northern Harriers or Bald Eagles, I was going to trust God and trust that
whatever I saw that day, He had put there and that everything was part of His creation
and worthy of my attention.
My day began with a detour.
My life has been filled with many detours.
I think I’m still on several long, extremely winding and
seemingly unending detours.
But I am learning to trust God and His plan and appreciate
whatever path He has me on.
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