Up ahead on the trail I spot a red plastic milk crate.
It’s flipped upside down and has a laminated message secured to the top:
“Turtle eggs. Do not disturb. The female box turtle lays her eggs and will leave to return to her nest up to 3 months after laying”.
I peer through the slats and see absolutely nothing – not even a small mound of dirt or a wee bit of disturbed earth.
Hmm.
Over the next three months or so, I will interrupt my walk and look through the little plastic holes, and I will continue to see nothing. Not a hint of egg.
Nothing at all.
But, knowing me, I’ll keep up the vigil every single day until the crate is carted away buy the volunteers, with no evidence of surviving eggs.
Because I want to believe that the mother turtle will crawl through the dense woods and find her way back to her babies. I want to believe that they will be reunited and all will be well.
Don’t we all want a happy ending?
Don’t we all crave something good, even transformative, to unfold in our daily round?
Especially when the odds are low?
I am absolutely guilty of being a champion of small possibiities.
Like the tiny feral kittens skittering underneath an abandoned house over by the liquor store. If I just approached them slowly I might rescue them. But they flee under the house. It’s too dark to see them – I can’t save them.
But someone else will rescue them, right? They’ll end up in good homes, right?
You might call this magical thinking.
Maybe it is.
When I was a little girl I saved up my money and sent it away to buy “Sea Monkeys”.
Remember those?
The pictures advertised these tiny otherworldly creatures that you could grow at home in a jar of water. Pink families with smiling faces. They were royals. They were wearing crowns and one even held a scepter.
And when they came in the mail, I sprinkled the dry powder into a large glass and held my breath.
It was days before they hatched.
And then nothing.
Nothing but little flecks.
I guess they eventually dissolved. But it was such a disappointment that they weren’t what I believed they would be.
They were nothing.
And later I found out that they were common brine shrimp.
But I was that kid – embarasingly gulible – and always anticipating the unlikely.
And I still believe in magical things even now.
So my son works for Riverkeeper, a non-profit in NYC that is cleaning up the Hudson River.
Because of progressive policy and the work of organizations like his, a whole slew of threatened species has come back to these waters. Sturgeon, seals, even dolphins and whales.
Whales in the NYC harbor – how unbelievable.
And he recently sent me a video of them breeching in the waters and I just couldn’t believe it.
It was unreal.
In the polluted New York City harbor?
It was an impossible sight, a miraculous one, really.
And I still can’t believe it.
And of course I know we live in a time of huge disappointments, in things big and small.
But I still cling to a belief in that the overlooked things matter most, simply because they are small or unlikely or unexpected.
And if the small things don’t matter, than nothing matters.
And so I just want to be that person who can keep looking to find them – the turtle eggs and the kittens and even the brine shrimp floating in a bowl.
It’s called hope.
What else is there?
And I want to spy the dolphins and the seals and the sturgeon.
The whales in the city!
The struggling bits of life. The things that say yes in the face of so much no.
Don’t you?
honeybees & reveries 