Applause

It is June 6th 2024 at 10pm. All the lights in the house are off, and my wife is standing in near-pitch-darkness at the bay window that overlooks  the west side of our double lot in the city limits of St. Louis.

The lights are all off because she’s watching fireflies, lightning bugs…  flashing over waist high vegetation in an 8′ x 60′ strip of our yard that has been allowed to grow wild.

She’s fought long and hard to defend the decision to allow a vacant lot’s worth of ‘weeds’ to grow amidst the mostly-manicured lawns in our neighborhood. 

Atitudes are changing. A small few of our neighbors are tentatively adopting low-mow practices in the spring, and letting their lawns get a little shaggier in general. But in the main, our neighbors regard her miniature patch of wildness with tacit disapproval.

A rare and occasional yellow flash appears over their neat, well-tended lawns.

But over her wild strip, the flashes are popping in profusion, like flashbulbs lining the red carpet on Oscar night. 

She is seeing the silent applause of nature; the reward for her devotion and work.