- …..there was only a hint of dawn scraping the far edge of the eastern horizon; Old Sol had yet to put on his work boots and was still shambling about the celestial kitchen grouchily searching for his misplaced eyeglasses. The air outside the house was still, frozen, eerily silent…..yet undeniably teeming with promise. Everything seemed to be waiting for something important to happen. What? I don’t know yet. But not a living thing stirred, not even the ubiquitous flock of sparrows that ordinarily mounted a noxious cacophony from the unseen innards of the huge spruce tree standing sentinel over the far end of the driveway. Nor did the two furry white dogs that typically bustled around the front yard as though their tails were on fire and their appetites could never be sated. Nor did the pair of bluejays that under virtually any other circumstance could be heard raucously jeering from one of the myriad maple treetops encircling the property. Something important was about to transpire, something monumental, something of biblical proportions……….a new day was about to commence!!! And every organism in nature stopped to pay their respects to this regular, yet unerringly seminal, event. For such is the texture of life, and such is the way of the cosmos, that today may very well be the final time each and every living creature is afforded the opportunity to experience this greatest of all miracles—the miracle of sentience and the miracle of life on Earth. Death can happen cruelly and suddenly and unexpectedly to everybody and every living thing, and oftentimes does. The animals we share our pygmy-sized planet with know that instinctually, and we hominids damned sure better understand this plain fact as well lest we suffer the consequences without ever having truly appreciated our preternaturally glorious fortune…..
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Fred's Soapbox 