Weeding the ScienCenter

I am a natural disaster. I am the sudden, unpredictable obliteration of an entire habitat. There was a healthy patch of clover between the ScienCenter mini-golf course and the brick wall of the building. Now there's not. Now, instead of lush greenery and bulging purple flowers, there's a strip of dirt, ugly and bare and hot and dry. Not only do the clovers vanish with a few waves of my callous hands, but also the spiders, centipedes, aphids, bees, wasps, ants, and all the other bugs that fly and crawl and dig become immediately and inexplicably homeless. Some are scattered into unfamiliar lands by clinging desperately to the doomed vegetation. Spiders skitter several inches up the newly exposed wall, then halt in disbelieving bewilderment to survey their unrecognizable homeland. Worms and centipedes writhe fiercely in silent panic until they find shelter under ragged clods of the freshly scarred earth. I've never seen insects run so fast.

I am as abrupt as an earthquake, as destructive as a hurricane. I am environmental annihilation personalized. I am one unit of humanity playing out humanity's instinctual duty to raze nature. My strip of former clover could be a miniature subdivision in its infancy, all ready to pour concrete roads and driveways and basements.

When that deed was done, I went to the other side of the building to plant geraniums. That reversed my conscience.

Mostly.