Third week in April, rainy days persist.
Then one deep dark night, the deluge came.
After that it's
Katy bar the door as regards anything like 'normal'.
A landscape that hadn’t seen this much rain in so short a time since who knows
when positively overflowed.
Fleeing for their lives against rampaging current not of their making, riverine residents find refuge upon
placid waters hidden deep in what's normally dry forest. Where by rights, they simply oughtn't be.
Their real world, unbound.
Terrestrial denizens struggle to make due.
This duck raises her brood in an exposed shallow pool left on
otherwise flat prairie soon enough to be muck, infested with biting bugs.
One might even say the regular order of things had been
overturned.
Except of course, that’s nowhere near true.
Instead, it’s reinvigorated.
For certain, not everything survived. But that's simply the way of things.
With May, persistent rain ended and spring occasionally shone bright.
The waters receded.
And when walking the green landscape of my youth…
…what’d been laid low by more than a century of abuse and callous
neglect was risen into a new semblance of what it’s meant to be.
And for the 1st time in civilized memory,
I beheld an entirely reasonable approximation
of the original
forest primeval.
