OPINION: My mother and my nature

As a child, I pictured God as our heavenly father and Mother Nature as his wife, and I feel as though a faint trace of that innocent notion has stayed with me all these years. Maybe in my childish mind it took some of the “blame” off of God for things like black-widow spiders, fire ants, and water moccasins. I thought of Him as having had to compromise with a sometimes whimsical, sometimes implacable spouse who was occasionally downright mean.

How else can we understand the reason for some of the things we have to deal with? Did you know we had legless lizards here in Georgia? They’re called glass lizards, and according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia “they can be distinguished from snakes because they have eyelids and ear openings.” Rest assured, I will not be getting close enough to look for the eyelids, so for all I know they’re out there in my yard right now.

Here’s a partial list of what I have seen in the yard: raccoons, possums, rabbits, mice, foxes, skunks (occasionally), deer (including one adolescent male who is very full of himself and my impatiens plants just now, likes to go bounding over invisible hurdles just to show off, and is irresistibly beautiful and a real pain in the garden), fire ants (of course), scorpions, yellow jackets, wasps (their nest is under the cover of my power outlet on the front porch), grubs, bumblebees, mosquitoes, and way too many squirrels.

My sister’s yard also has way too many squirrels; I counted 19 in her front yard one morning, and the reason I could count them was that they didn’t run away. They seemed to just yawn and say, “Oh, it’s only her again.” When we planted ivy and impatiens in her flower boxes, those squirrels could hardly wait to get in there and start burying acorns — I guess because potting soil is so much softer than Georgia clay. Someone suggested sprinkling black pepper on the soil, and we did: two big boxes’ worth. I pictured little cartoon squirrels sneezing like crazy. But the real ones were unperturbed or delighted — undeterred, for sure.

As for the birds in the yard, and aside from the fact that they wake me up at dawn all through the spring, I go to great lengths every year to keep them from nesting on my porch, due to a nasty episode with bird lice many years ago in Virginia, where we had birds nesting in the eaves of our house. In April I repeatedly destroyed the nest being built in a pot of ivy by my front door. Then I went to New York for a visit, and came home to a magnificent, puffy sparrows’ nest with little eggs in it — and now we have baby birds, cute as they can be. Awww. I’m just praying that they’re clean! Thanks, Mother N.

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.