Destination Nowhere

My shoulders stiff from hours stooped over student papers last night, I take hold of the handle and begin pulling 50+pounds of twins in the red wagon.

Wyatt knows what it means when I click the blue straps around two little waists. And he responds as only he can--skipping, jumping up and down, running in excited jubilation.

But even though he knows what's happening, he still asks the same question each day. "We go on a nature walk!?"

He and I march through thick grass, wet from Sunday's showers; through clean packed dirt marked with fresh deer tracks at the edge of the fallow field; and through crawfish hole territory where a village of towering mud homes makes easy targets for small feet to kick over.

As we make our way around the yard, Wyatt kicks at each ant pile to reveal an underground network filled with white baby ants. He adds one more small stick to the towering pile of limbs needing to be burned. He picks me blue weed blossoms to wear in my hair or put in the back porch vase.

The point isn't to get exercise, although that's a side benefit. It isn't to go fast and get the journey over with.

No, in this case, the journey is the destination.

For a few minutes, we stop our individual labors and join together, this mommy and her children, to notice God's creation changing around us.

We marvel over the single pear blossom, open out of season. The pink toadstool near the back "hill". Stiff moss growing on a rotten tree branch. Tire tracks from daddy's lawnmower labors. A woolly bear caterpillar that, as Wyatt put it, curled up into a "prick-i-ly ball."

Thanksgiving isn't one day a year at our house. God's creation gives a new reason to be thankful every day...if we just take the time to really look around us.