There’s a tendency to give nature a face. To call it Mother, as though that makes it knowable. But nature doesn’t ask permission, it moves with an insistence that isn’t kindness so much as inevitability.
The land remembers what it’s supposed to do. Season after season. Loss after loss. Growth returns not because it’s hopeful, but because it can’t do otherwise.
There’s a stretch of coastline not far from where I live where the beach is always shifting. What was once flat during my childhood now rises into a six-foot shelf of sand stretching along the shore. It didn’t arrive dramatically. And there was no warning. Or apology.
Mother Nature will do as she pleases.
R. H. DIXON 