What you see and what you don't

Three years ago, the man who lives next door erected a new fence. Just chicken wire and old planks to keep his goats from straying and he pushed his yard a little way into what everyone called the empty space at the back of our houses. No one said a word. It was just there.

That empty piece of land would flood when the rains were heavy. We caught tadpoles in jam jars. You were sent to pluck bitter leaves from the wild shrub that grew densely along the edges. That land was never empty. It held things we needed and things we didn’t. There were beetles, birds and small snakes to keep down the rat population. The heron that stood one legged some mornings had a spot.

The fence went up and the land was cleared. Cassava was planted. Good for him is what some people said. And they said he's putting the land to very good use.

Now when I pass by that fence, I see how complete a thing can be without needing me in it. The fence line was no longer a question, but a complete thing that did not require my presence. It wasn’t an idle patch of earth wasted or in need of a man with a machete. That patch of scrubland wasn’t waiting, it wasn’t fallow or wasted or crying out for a man with a machete, it was raising tadpoles, growing medicine from the weeds and feeding the heron.

We walk by these places every day and see nothing. But the animals see their entire world in that dirt. Routes, feeding grounds, hiding places. All packed into a place that you would call useless waste of space. There is nothing these animals and living organisms are waiting on us to build. They are not waiting for us to build something, they are just living.

This is no fiction, this is what's happening to wild life right now. In our perspective we see progress and development but they see destruction and more struggles.

The original thumbnail source was from Pixabay.but edited by me

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