AUGUST 5, 2026 – One of the many things I appreciate about nature in all its moods, shapes, sounds, sizes, odors and colors, is that while we humans strut around, pushing and shoving one another in this direction and that, scaling snowy mountain peaks, taking deep dives into the sea, scampering around in our towns and cities and across the countryside, poking our noses here, there and everywhere, and in many instances, thumbing our noses at nature, “nature” as it were, or rather, the rest of nature, since we ourselves are very much a part of “nature,” carries forth with dogged persistence despite our ongoing wars and assaults against it. Sometimes nature “fights back,” even in the most self-destructive manner—witness the fires, the storms, the droughts, the rising temperatures, the retreating glaciers, the wholesale die-offs of species. In other cases, however, nature resorts to . . . the Song of Carefree Obliviousness, or so it seems as we go about our lives while the songbirds sing.
I’m thinking right now of the cardinals and robins in our own backyard. They’ve ginned up a veritable chorus of music—much to my amusement when I consider that these feathered creatures are evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs. Who can imagine a dinosaur singing and in the most light-hearted keys of A, C, D and F major? Or at least chattering with a musical lilt—except for crows, grackles, starlings and . . . eagles with their non-majestic cackle.
In our current times of political tumult, ill-conceived war, and dissembled norms for the common good, I find my refuge in nature, wherever I might be—walking along the shoreside path through the woods up at the lake or along the manicured flower beds of an urban public park or stepping outside the front doorway of our house and seeing the moon rising above the chimney of a house across the street. Finding calm in nature isn’t burying my head in the sand. It’s raising my thoughts into the fresh air (at least when it’s clear of wildfire smoke).
But then out of the blue or more accurately, out of the dark shadows of the laundry department down in our basement, a mouse invades our domain; the unseemly, unwelcome side of nature intrudes on our lives.
I wasn’t on hand for the most recent incident of such unsettling discovery. I was happily ensconced on our back porch, working away to the accompaniment of a cardinal perched at the very top of the neighbor’s very crabby apple tree. Shattering the scene was my wife’s shriek, as she tossed a laundry basket—with laundry—out the back doorway adjacent to the porch.
“I caught a live mouse in the laundry basket!” She announced to the neighborhood. If you know anything about Beth, you know that mice are her mortal enemies. Any sign of a mouse and you can be sure that an Orkin truck will soon be parked in front of our house and its driver, Tina, our designated terminator, will be at our door, ready to do Beth’s bidding against . . . a mouse in the house. To Tina’s credit—or our absences and lack of awareness when present—no mice have been noticed for many months; perhaps a year or more.
Fighting nature, I’ve discovered, takes as much time, money and effort as loving nature. The rewards of fighting nature, however, fall way short of the benefits of enjoying nature. I mean, take the case of the mice. In the words of our esteemed president, we can shout, “Fight, fight, fight!” as we pump our right fist into the air, but the mice will simply scurry, hide, and wait us out. They know how to exact revenge, and it isn’t by rearing up on their hind legs, twitching their whiskers, baring their incisors, swishing their tails, putting up their fists, and squeaking, “Fight, fight, fight!” Before you can say, “Tom” as in Tom & Jerry, the pipsqueak Jerry is . . . hiding beyond capture.
The best way to fight nature is on the sly—entrapment, for example, though I must confess, when finding a mousetrap after “a Jerry” has sprung the spring, I do feel a measure of remorse at the sight of the beady black eyes staring lifelessly up at me, the human monster. I don’t consider myself a monster. I think of myself as a friend of nature, but there I am, doing what humans do: fighting nature. Yet, for every mouse in a . . . SNAP! . . . trap, countless more are out there, in there, up there, down there, waiting, waiting, waiting, to gnaw, to scamper, to scavenge when no one’s looking. To slay a single mouse is no victory.
In short, whether the fight is against mice or hail, swimmer’s itch or a hurricane, nature always wins. If you can’t fight city hall, you surely can’t fight the monster storm or . . . countless “Jerrys.” Or put another way, no matter how insistently we tangle with nature—head on or indirectly—nature will remain in charge of earth and of us. In that truth I find reason for our species to be awed and humbled, and in the process, more respectful of nature’s power, as well as moved her every-changing, multi-faceted beauty. And in the process, the power wielded by our species recedes in significance, at least in the grand scheme of things, giving respite from ourselves.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
