Spring morning walk,

We walked the Gensburg Prairie Sunday morning, looking for signs of spring.  Everything was quiet and hidden waiting for winter to steal away.  We have been a part of the Friends of the Indian Boundary Prairies ever since we moved here in 1983.  As we walked, I wondered who would take our place when we leave.  We don’t do a lot of the preservation work, but more of the bookkeeping and the newsletter for years.  We have a cadre of hard preservation workers.  Occasionally we pick up some tools and help out.    On Midlothian’s Spring Clean-up day you will find me walking the perimeter picking up the litter that accumulated over the year.  I want the neighborhood to appreciate the prairie not hold it in scorn.

Just think around 200 years ago bison roamed this area along with a balance of nature’s bounty until the white man moved in.  Now we have remnants of this magnificence.  The balance is no longer there, creatures are vanishing, and the ecosystem hangs by a thread.  We can’t always see what is becoming extinct but another relies on them to exist.  The stewards are deliberately documenting and working to sustain what we have left.

The Indian Boundary Prairie remnants were to be housing developments but the depression came along and left them pristine.  If you look carefully you will see where the streets were planned.  In the late 1970’s several people took notice of the abundance of prairie plants still remaining.  With their persistence, time, effort, documenting, sweat, blood and tears the rest of us can appreciate a tiny look at what a prairie might have been.  It is a wonder, people from Germany and Japan have come here to study our remnants but many of the locals do not know it exists.