Weekend Highlights

You’d think that the highlight of this naturalist-wanna-be’s weekend would have been watching this toad couple laying strings of eggs in a backyard pond. Only a few of us were even distracted by the amphibious antics from the main event—shooting photos of our daughters and their dates before their senior prom.


Or maybe the highlight, as an environmentalist, should have been the following interchange, around 2 am, at the After Prom party, between two students, worn-down by eating, dancing, swimming, and more eating, searching for a receptacle for their gnawed pizza crusts—

Girl: Here’s one {i.e., a trash can}.
Boy: It’s recycling.
Girl: Oh.

The couple moved slowly on, still looking. When more desiderata of green living become so routine that exhausted teenagers comply without questioning, we’ll have a healthier planet.


But mostly this weekend I was a mom, admiring and enjoying my grown-up daughter on one of her happiest days. I hope that she felt at least some of the ebullience John Muir expressed after his first few weeks in the Sierra:

. . . . This June seems the greatest of all the months of my life, the most truly, divinely free, boundless like eternity, immortal. Everything in it seems equally divine—one smooth, pure, wild glow of Heaven’s love, never to be blotted or blurred by anything past or to come.