And Here's a Story About How Life is Short.

Should I even tell you this? 

So there we were in Cheddar Gorge.  It's where cheddar cheese originated.  It's like England's only "canyon".  And look!  A darling little duck family!  I stepped into the quiet street to take a picture.  So cute, just a feathered-family strolling across the street -- you go, ducks.

Then that car came around the bend, and I cursed it for ruining my picture.  But it was going so slow that nobody's worried about the ducks, you know?  'Cause the driver's bound to see them. 

And the car slows down even more, and more, and the ducks are just waddling along, and the car's really crawling along, but it's... not ...exactly stopping....

...not stopping....

and I'm starting to think that the driver is cutting it a bit too close... 

and then sure enough, he just ran right over them. the whole family. driving slowly.  

It was too tragic, and I was so angry.  but when I could uncover my eyes and look again, the driver was out of his car.  He was a white-bearded man with a car full of camping stuff, and he was covering his face and weeping over the ducks.  Somehow that made it better, because he really hadn't seen them; but it also made it worse, because now it was just a horrible tragedy.  

There are a million things around us, dying all the time.  Sometimes we tune into the tragedy of a little creature's passing -- like in Charlotte's Web when we suddenly care about a dying spider.  (When E.B. White recorded that audio book, he couldn't get through the death scene because he cried every time. I love that.)   Anyway, every now and then you see the tragedy of 'insignificant' deaths, and the world becomes a little bit wider.  Bugs die, and duck families die, and pets die, and even our most beloved humans die, and we are all little creatures with only a moment on this beautiful spot called earth.