Nature Recovery

At the lab where I work, the location of my office has changed over the years. Depending on which group I worked with and my level of seniority, I have been from place to place, building to building. For a long stretch of time when I was a postdoctoral researcher, there was a bit of an office space crunch and many of the younger folks were assigned space in a series of networked trailers. This maze of 20 or so trailers was all interconnected into one big enclosure like a series of lego pieces. It was located in a small field next to the main office building. It wasn't very fancy, but it was a fine place to do my thing.

About 7 years ago, several new buildings were erected on the lab site and the folks that were assigned space in the sprawling trailer complex were moved out into real brick and mortar structures. Several years after that, the aging trailers were hauled away and the field where the trailers had been parked for so long, was left to its own devices. I walk past this field several times a week as I go to meetings on one part of the site or another, but the other day as I walked past, I stopped and took notice with a bit of wonder. It seems that nature has quickly worked to reclaim what is rightfully hers. Now a proud young pine forest has risen up from the ground. Even as I took the photo for this piece, I stumbled across a few deer bounding through the space.

So often man and his unforgiving machines are thanklessly taking more and more of the land for his own uses. It was just nice to see even a small area taken back.