We moved in with my grandparents twice during my childhood. The first time, I was five years old, and my mom was in a wheelchair for months after giving birth to my sister. We stayed with my grandparents in their small house in an old Memphis neighborhood for nearly a year, until my mom could walk without pain and parent without daily assistance. The second time, I was eleven and my parents were building a new house after quickly selling our old one. My grandparents had retired by then and were living in their own large, newly built home on sixty acres of land, complete with fruit trees, a small but dense forest, a pond, and a handful of ducks that quacked and carried on until we walked around the pond with my grandfather every evening and scattered dried corn on the ground for their dinner. During the nine months it took for our house to be built, my brother, sister, and I explored the acreage of our grandparents’ property as often as the weather and our school schedule allowed.
One summer day, the three of us explored a corner of the woods that curved around the small clearing where my grandmother tended her pear and apple trees. In western Tennessee, summers are hot and sticky, and if you’re going to be outside, you better find some shade or give up. I’m certain we’d been sent outside to “burn off some energy”—a phrase I often use on my own sons these days. While we ducked under tree branches and picked our way through weeds and ferns, we kept an eye out for any kind of ivy with suspicious-looking leaves. My brother, the oldest, paused our walk and announced that we should “settle” this part of the woods. Make it our own. Make it a clubhouse of sorts, minus the house. I’d recently read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodges Burnett and was desperate for a “bit of earth” to call my own, so I quickly agreed and followed my brother when he ran out of the woods, up the hill, and into the garage to rummage through our grandfather’s tools. We returned with a pair of new hedge trimmers, a rake, and a shovel. For the next few days, we fought with nature to turn that corner of the woods into our own space. We cleared a path with the rake, appointed “rooms” for one another after trimming tree branches, and fashioned seats out of fallen tree trunks. For at least a week, we worked to make the woods a place to call our own. But every day, nature fought back. Branches we’d tried to bend lifted back upwards toward the sunlight. Seemingly overnight, the path we’d raked sprouted new grass and weeds. Spiders re-spun the webs we’d destroyed.
After about a week of fruitless work and one lecture from my grandfather about leaving his good hedge clippers out in the rain overnight, we gave up and returned to our normal pursuits of feeding the ducks, fishing off the dock, helping my grandmother pick blueberries, and sneaking back indoors for snacks and air conditioning.
On my birthday last summer, my husband and I traveled a half hour out of town to the first wooded area that showed up on the hiking app. We parked in an empty gravel parking lot at the trailhead and spent the next hour hiking around General Watkins Lake. A family cemetery with pre-Civil War headstones lay at the other trailhead, and I wondered if the bodies beneath the ground had grown up in the thickly wooded area. Had they, as children, tried to domesticate the dense forest my husband and I had hiked through, swatting mosquitoes and ducking under spider webs? Did they discover that nature fought back and that sometimes the best response was not to control it but to marvel at it instead?
I don’t live in a wooded area anymore. I live in a proper neighborhood with a yard that my teenaged son has to mow every Saturday for six months of the year. I work to keep my knockout rose bush trimmed and free from Japanese beetles, and by August, I’ve usually waved a white flag at the weeds in the flowerbeds. Nature always fights back against our efforts at domestication, doesn’t it? Sure, there are big cities full of skyscrapers instead of trees, paved streets without a grassy patch for miles. But have you ever seen a weed push its way through a piece of concrete? It’s brazen and bold. Miles of concrete and one small scrap of green still creeps through a crack in the pavement. Without persistent caretaking, nature will return your bit of earth to its green, branchy beginning.
I think about Adam’s curse when I remember our childhood efforts at turning a forest into a house. Work itself is a pre-curse wonder. Adam and Eve worked in the garden long before their teeth sunk into a piece of forbidden fruit. Subduing the earth was a command from God, and probably one that yielded much fruit. But as it always, always does, sin soured everything. From the moment he disobeyed, Adam would fight with the earth, toiling with sweat and pain as the earth fought back. Where he would labor, thorns and thistles would flourish.
That second time we lived with my grandparents, I remember my grandmother standing at her impossibly large blueberry bushes, swatting at wasps and mosquitoes, getting sunburned and run off her feet with fatigue while she picked and preserved gallons and gallons of berries. Her bit of earth always fought back. And I wonder sometimes when I eat a handful of blueberries or take a hike through a dense copse of trees if heaven will hold the same delights of taste or the quiet wonder of thickly treed path? But surely without the bugs that bite or the sweat that stings your eyes as you work or the sun that burns your skin. Will there be duck ponds and blueberry bushes? Hikes through the woods or bare feet hanging off the dock while watching the dragonflies skim across the the water? Will it be summer without humidity? An eternal spring?
I can’t say, of course. But I know that the new heavens and the new earth will not bear the marks of our sin. Creation won’t groan or fight back the next time. Jesus will reign forever and whatever memories I have of that golden year living in the woods will pale in comparison with what awaits us. I know for sure that the earth won’t fight back, and maybe we’ll have a bit of earth, maybe we won’t. It won’t matter. But it will be good forever.
Maybe we’ll have a bit of earth, maybe we won’t. It won’t matter. But it will be good forever. Share on XPhoto by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.