Morning Thanks--Life too

Back in March, when four inches of warm rain fell far too fast on land where the snow cover had been substantial, where somehow--I don't honestly know how--that warm rain cut through the foot-thick ice on the river, the Floyd River thundered out its banks and turned into something that more closely resembled the Big Sioux. 

The neighbor's bush line took a beating, got stripped buck naked by a torrent that wouldn't be thwarted, then swept into misshapen brooms that will never again upright themselves. Have a look. 

All that debris is the flotsam of that incredible March flood. I raked up bales of it yesterday, and I'm only fractionally finished. The easiest way to have rid of it would have been to burn the whole mess, everything in the acre behind our house; but northwest Iowa doesn't proffer dry, windless days. 

Whatever we went through is pitiably little next to the losses Nebraskans took. I'm sure they still look at their bamboozled land as if it weren't theirs--if they haven't already left. I mean, the great loss in our neighborhood is that all those ice chunks in all that water took out our neighbor's hedge. It was a beauty, but basically that's it. For us, not even a drop in the basement. 

This is what happens. . .

. . .when icebergs like these come barreling through a hedge on a river with a head of steam in late winter.



Things get beat up and broken and skinned alive. 

But in every last shot I've put up here--except the icebergs--there's some everlovin' emerald. Every shot. Life itself is a miracle that just doesn't go down without a fight.

Look at those serpentine shoots, aspiring--on their way!--to being more. Look closely. See 'em? That's life too.