I've somehow managed to capture a Friday morning to myself. Since we live in "Derby Country", it appears to be sacriligious to send children to school on the day of The Oaks.  And since we have been living by the school calendar for the sake of our Spaniard.......we have a long weekend.

I really don't mind.

I could use it myself.

The kids are still sleeping. Honey went in for a half day of work, surprisingly. And I have a sweet time to myself.

We live in the back corner of a quiet, older, suburbian neighborhood. Beyond our street lies a cornfield. Past the end of our dead-end, begins a long stretch of woods. We often go for a nature walk back through those woods to explore, search for signs of wildlife, collect rocks, and commune with the outdoors.

Behind our home, as I look out my kitchen window, there is a run-off creek. Most of the year it's just a gentle trickle of a stream. But in the spring it becomes it's own ecosystem with the birth of spring frogs, crawdads, and earthworms...a real outdoor school for the kids.  During rainy seasons, it can evolve into a  "raging river", as my children claim. Beyond that there is a "just big enough" patch of woods (one that tempts the explorer into the larger wood) and a small field that the kids love to play in, and where the utility company maintains a small pumping station back in the corner. 

I fondly remember countless days of looking out my kitchen window to see a dozen kids from the neighborhood climbing trees, spending hours building forts, laying in the grass, playing football and kickball and baseball in the field, and patiently crouched down on the bank of the stream, looking for "Big Daddy" frogs to catch.

The windy creekbed enters into the woods here. We have made many memories on long spring afternoons seeing how far we could follow the rockbed before getting tired and heading back. The woods go for a long way. And it's hard to really visualize where we are in the large scheme of things once we're back there. That's all part of the experience.

The funny thing is, there is our neighborhood, and "our woods" (which really isn't "ours" at all...they belong to the farmer) and a couple of small farms around here. But we are all boxed in by two busy streets that run parallel and two other streets that run parallel the other way. All that we love to explore back in those woods really have boundaries all around. But as long as we've stayed to the trail, or the creekbed, the boundaries have been hidden to us.

So that's the "history".

All of this I tell you to give you a mental picture of all that we've enjoyed in the last decade of living in this house and making it our home. Now we come up to about last fall when we found out that the neighborhood council decided to sell the field behind our house to a developer and use it and our small patch a woods to build a half dozen houses that apparently are much needed in our older, quiet neighborhood.

(Honestly, I have a hard time imagining who is going to come looking to buy a new smaller home in the middle of a 40 year old subdivision. But, who am I.)

As you can imagine, it's the kids who have had the hardest time with all of this. Last fall when the surveyors came out to mark off the property. Unbeknownst to us until later, the "gang" decided that they were going to initiate a full-out offense against the "bad men". =] They secretly pulled up the stakes. And one day they decided to dig a gigantic hole about four feet wide and three feet deep in the middle of the trail. They argued that this would keep the enemies from coming across their trail with their bulldozer. LOL

I have to admit that I was kindof proud of all the kids trying to stand up for what they believed in. I truly hoped that their declaration would pull a heart string of someone over there and they would rethink their plan. Unfortunately, spring came and they put up one of those bright red, plastic fences around the perimeter of the site, which by-the-way, encompassed almost all of the kids trail and small patch of woods.

Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning just after school started for us, we heard the sound of big equipment starting up. And we stood on our back porch in silence, as we watched them bulldoze down almost all of the big beautiful trees that we climbed in and played around for years. In the days to come, they quickly and without hesitation, took big machines down into the creekbed and in the exact spot where Clara claimed was the "main frog pool", they jackhammered all the creek rock, hauled it out, laid huge drain pipe down, filled in with gravel and dirt, and rolled out a dirt road so they could take their big machines across and "invade our woods".

I called my husband from the porch and solemnly spoke "There goes the big tree we watched that racoon climb that day.....there goes the hard-pressed trail back into the woods we've ran up and down thousands of time....there goes Ruby our hamster's gravesite....." It was so depressing.

In light of all that's happened and how disappointing it is to all of us, Connor said something the other day that really got me thinking. You know how the Bible says to not complain and to be joyful in all things. Well, he found an upside to all of this. He said, "Look at it this way, now we'll have new families move in and maybe they'll have kids our age!" 

Bless him. In his nine year old way, he saw how to not complain and how to be joyful in all circumstances....and most of all, to trust God even though he didn't understand. A good lesson for me. It's been good for me to watch this process through the eyes of my kids. To see how they've dealt with the loss. And how they've worked through it in their own way and come back to the truth.

Thankfully, we still have the entrance into the woods at the end of our street. So there will still be many adventures ahead for us. And, we've learned that change can be hard, but inevitable. Sometimes we can protest it and try to keep it from happening. But sometimes, we just need to submit, accept and trust that God's plan is perfect, and bigger then anything we can imagine. We can't always understand the "why's". But we can always trust them to be answered in God's perfect timing.