Seems to Me You'd Stop and See How Beautiful They Are

I sit in my green Adirondack, book in hand, but dozing off. Sensing something, I don’t know what, I crack one eye open to see an inchworm just inches from my face, having descended from one of the tall oaks in my backyard.

Ah, inchworm season.

Don’t know much about them. I suppose they eventually do what most larvae do and grow into moths or flies or something, but no one I ask seems to know or care about that. I suppose if they grew into luna moths or tiger swallowtails that would be one thing, but inchworms seem more famous for their larval lives. (does not having a song written about you qualify you as famous?).

Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,

You and your arithmetic, you’ll probably go far.

Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,

Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.

We, too, have important arithmetic: number of water filters placed, number of kids in school, the percentage of household latrines in a village. Essential metrics, these “marigolds.”

Every now and again, though, it is nice to step back and de-focus from latrines and filters long enough to see “how beautiful” a village, an island is becoming.

“However beautiful the strategy,

you should occasionally look at the results.”

                                                                                Winston Churchill