My personal saint of Earth Day

I'm fairly confident that the people who initiated Earth Day had no idea that April 22 was my mother's birthday. She was around long before Earth Day began so, to my way of thinking, they should have known.
And if they had known my mother, they would have known that no one loved and cherished the earth more than my mother. Rosalie DeYoung Shepherd was raised on a farm in Prairie View, Kansas -- the very northwest corner of Kansas. Growing up on the farm, respecting nature was a way of life. Growing up in a very, very devout Dutch family and community, love of God was expressed in reverence for the world that God created. On the farm, mother's family believed that they were co-creating with God as they raised cattle, pigs, chickens, wheat and corn.
Mama's adult years were far away from the Kansas farm. She raised four children in Methodist parsonages across the state of Kentucky. But her reverence for the earth was imprinted in her heart and went with us everywhere. The yard of every home we lived in was more beautiful after we left than when we came. Mother loved flowers and she had a green thumb that would make anything grow.
Long before communities had recycling pickup, my mother recycled everything. Nothing was put in the garbage until it had been hopelessly used up. Mother grew up in the Depression. She didn't take anything for granted and she definitely didn't believe in wasting any resource. And we children learned quickly that we had better not even think about littering. That was a cardinal sin. Thou shalt not waste anything and thou shalt not litter were ever-present additions to biblical mandates. For the longest time, I thought those rules were quotes directly from the Bible.
Quotes from Mother's heart are only slightly less authoritative than a direct quote from a biblical passage. And she lived what she taught. She had a reverence for the earth that showed up in everyday, practical ways. She didn't worship nature. But she believed that this world was a gift given to us by the God we did worship and that we would be unforgiveably ungracious if we did not respect the gift.
So how wonderfully, perfectly appropriate that Earth Day would be held on my Mother's birthday. May Earth Day impart the reverence for the creation that my mother lived for us every day.