"Why are you here"? asked Mother Nature "Why are you wandering my woods and fields?"
I don't think I heard her the first few times she asked but she took my silence as avoidance and tried to get my attention. Pointy sticks scratched my scalp as I scrambled up a deer path looking for an elusive letterbox. I stubbed my toe hard on a rock that seemed to come out of nowhere. I blamed it on fatigue and vowed to eat something when I got back to the main trail.
My morning saw very little of the main trail and by mid-day Mother Nature's voice started to become clear to me, "Why are you walking in my thickets and groves?"
"Why indeed," I wondered as I tried to twist my bare arm free from clinging green briers that had pierced my skin.
"Do not turn away from me when I am speaking to you!" she insisted but I gritted my teeth and stubbornly plowed my way through the grabbing needles of the raspberry bushes. I really hoped the next letterbox had a nice stamp, this hunt was a killer.
In the mid-afternoon, I stopped to take a long drink of water and look at my map. A few more letterboxes on the edge of a field that I could bike through.
"Why did you come this way?" she clearly asked as I was bludgeoned by cornstalks as my bike whipped down the trail. Poison ivy met me at the entrance to the wooded area where I had hoped to start seeking one last letterbox. I tried a different approach and was met by a wall of multi-flora rose bushes.
Exhausted from a day of biking, hiking, bushwhacking and rock hopping, I later sat with my sweaty back against a tree. I tried to pick a thorn that had wedged itself deep into the heal of my palm as I looked out over the lake. The late afternoon sun turned the water a color that matched my many scratches and cuts. The sky was turning purple and mauve to match the bruises I had on my shins from the logs and rocks I had failed to avoid.
"Why do I come here?" I answered with a sigh as I reminisced on the day, "Because I love you so."
