Infinitesimally Infinite

I'd never seen anyone outside the house, but it always looked like I'd just missed them. A pile of recently delivered bark chips sat in the driveway next to the car that was forever standing watch in front of the garage. A ladder splayed open among some tall shrubs, or maybe short trees. I wasn't sure which. The front porch, deliciously cluttered with shiny glass bowls, and animal figurines reminded me of Grandma's house; warm, inviting, and safe. I felt like I could trust them, whoever the residents were. Around the corner, an overturned wheelbarrow was becoming one with the strip of nature left between the sidewalk and the street. Garden pathways wound around the luscious corridors of untended decorative plants. Everything from butterfly bushes to bleeding hearts melding together as the years continued to slip by.

As I marveled at the cacophony of it all, I realized my observations must still fall short. We have this ability to condense each leaf into a branch, and each branch into a tree, until it feels like the universe only holds a few billion big things instead of an amount of small things so incomprehensible that your mind would explode trying to contain it all. What untold wonders lie in the dirt beneath the green? How many bugs worked the soil, and maintained the plants while the owners of the house remained a mystery? What birds had landed here, and how many squirrels quarreled with them over food? The blades of grass stood tall yet unquantifiable, like the many hairs on my head, my arms, my legs; begging me to wonder how all of this infinity could come to exist in what couldn’t be more than a quarter acre.