Friday afternoon I was driving home from Hattiesburg Mississippi on Highway 98. 98 cuts through Ragland Hills, and as you come down a last gentle slope, ahead of you is a long flat stretch of highway all the way to the far horizon. Mounds of meringue clouds streaked the pale blue sky. The forest on both sides of the road looks dull even as new leaves are sprouting. I turned off the news; the reports of oil invading mashlands in Louisiana is so depressing. Mass murder and extinction is in the works; all the wildlife, where ever the oil washes up, will be destroyed; it seems inevitable now. So many living things, great and small will be lost forever. There was a gloom on the earth, as if it feels what is happening.

My blood, bones, every atom is composed of the air and water and food grown in the soil of the south. I put my feet on the ground and know I am part of this place, and it is a part of me. In the tenderest part of my soul I can feel the loss and tragedy of what man has done to a special and beautiful place, my south; wantonly assaulted and made ugly.

I don't have much time left; who knows how long, but each day a page is turned in the book of life and the end must come to me as it does to all of us. I will leave this earth sorry for the pervasive and destructive nature of humanity. We have made ourselves gods and used the earth and its natural resources like gluttonous pigs at the trough of indulgence and left a stinking pig sty behind with no thought or regard to other living things. But even gods must pay the piper sooner or later and that bleak future we have made for ourselves is coming.

susil