a sunday morning walk

 

“Isn’t it funny that the mountain is really a solid thing, and you can’t get it out of the ground?” she asks solemnly, studying the familiar white-and-blue pattern of the peak on the northwest horizon. “And when you get up close, those blue spots are really rocks and the white spots are snow.” I ask her what the mountain would be if it weren’t solid, and she says, “I don’t know, maybe a cloud. Do you think it looks different on the other side?”

We talk about the mountain for awhile. We talk about math and spelling and how Amy hates math, but “can read pretty much every word in the whole word.” She points out coyote scat on the roadside and reminisces about the time she saw one in the field—not a very big one, maybe a baby, but there was no mommy with it. She wants to know how a wolf and a coyote are different, and if wolves have to be shot in the heart to die the way bears do? What is it about the heart that makes things die if it stops working? And then I try to explain the biology.

The sun is a warm butter-yellow in the chill of an August morning. Amy was sure to grab her fleece jacket, pink leopard-print hat, and blue mittens just in case our late summer day suddenly ushered in a snow flurry. When we turn back down the driveway homeward, she takes off on her bike, leaving me to muse over our conversation. I had meant to spend this walk preparing my mind and heart to worship the Lord at church later, but perhaps a talk with my eight-year-old sister was exactly what I needed—a moment to marvel anew at the Creation of God: the immovable mountain and the different species of predators and the complexity of scientific law in our bodies, not to mention the inquisitive and sponge-like minds He put in little people like Amy.