Springtime a Hundred Years Hence

Dear Ones,

I am thinking of my father's garden with the apple trees and the berry brambles eighty years ago. There were rows of potatoes and Brussels sprouts with cabbage big and tight as footballs. I remember rhubarb and gooseberries enclosed in my mother's pastry, baked apples with custard, and hearty home-grown vegetables for our dinner. And there was sweet smelling lilac and lilies of the valley and bluebells.

In the Spring I remember collecting a bowl of water from the little brook that ran at the bottom of the garden, it had frog's spawn in it and I would watch the transformation of egg to tadpole and then finally one day the bowl with its rocks was empty as the baby frogs hopped back down to the brook where the life cycle would begin again. I hope that the oaks with their gnarly trunks and serrated leaves standing on either side of the brook will still keep guard over the Chad Valley where I grew up. I hope the row of lilac will still bloom and perhaps some wild brambles will show themselves in the Spring a hundred years hence. And I hope the frogs still croak on the shores of the little brook.

There was a little wild vixen who would accept my father's offering of chicken bones placed at the bottom of the garden after Sunday dinner. She cubbed every Spring and sometimes would venture with her baby all the way to the kitchen door to show him the little one. I hope she has a descendant who lives close to human habitation and learns to trust and visit and live in harmony with you in a hundred years.

For you in the future, you are fortunate that the delegates in Paris had remembrances like mine and hopes for their great great grandchildren similar to these I have for you; your future was secured in December of 2015.

Nana Noné