Biodegradable

Walking a two-mile trail all summer has paid off. It helped me drop ten pounds and is a good time for meditation. I've come up with outlines for stories or figured out how to handle a Sunday school lesson I was scheduled to teach.

 The changing seasons adds some variety to the trail. In the spring even the first shoots of skunk cabbage are a welcome sight. Then we move on to little wildflowers and lime green baby leaves on the trees. This summer a bird flew above me, scolding as it chased me away from where I assume it had a nest. In the middle of summer I walk before the sun heats up the world, sometimes as early as 6:30. After school starts I wait until after 8:30 when the school buses have finished their morning rounds. The scenery along the trail is changing again as the leaves are beginning to color. Some fields have been harvested and the crops that are still standing have turned brown.

Every couple weeks I take a trash bag along and pick up the trash so at least that part of the roadside is free of litter. I don't walk in the winter months so in the spring I took a garbage bag to pick up the winter's trash. Since then a grocery bag has been big enough if I do it every couple weeks. I don't know who is tossing all that trash but it is amazing how much accumulates in a couple weeks.

As I walked this morning I spied something I thought was trash but it turned out to be a fallen leaf. That set my mind going. That leaf grew to hang on a tree, not lie on the ground. So why isn't it trash when it's not on a tree? What makes some things trash and others not?

The things I picked up as trash were made of glass, paper, metal, plastic, and Styrofoam. They are not biodegradable. Imagine what would happen if trees grew plastic leaves. How would we dispose of centuries of plastic leaves?
The things God made are designed to support biological life cycles and part of that includes being biodegradable. The leaf served its purpose while it was on the tree and when it falls to the ground it serves another purpose. We rake leaves on our lawns so they don't smother and kill the grass, but the leaves that fall on the forest floor compost and turn into rich dark soil.

It's been said that God doesn't make junk. He doesn't make trash either. Humans are the messy ones. We make things that aren't biodegradable and worse yet, toss them out the windows of our vehicles. I can't keep the whole township clean but I can keep my trail clean. And if you're nosey enough to look, I want you to know that's where the brown glass bottle in the junk barrel in my garage came from.