Realizing Provision

1. Decide to make a leaf collection. (I decided this because making a collection was required for my science lab credit, but some day I hope to decide to do these kinds of things for fun.)

2. Go to the wildlife refuge down the road and collect some leaves. (**Do not actually do this. I thought this was illegal. Then I thought it wasn’t illegal. Now I know it is illegal.)

3. Throw out your illegal leaves. Or use them as bookmarks. (This happens by default if you put them in your history book to dry them and then forget about them.)

4. Take a walk through the woods in the rain for a purpose other than collecting.

5. See lots of different mosses and conclude that there must be at least ten different kinds.

6. Uproot little sections of moss whenever you see a kind that looks new and put them in your bag.

7. Put the bag down in your dorm living room and hope any little buggies living in the moss do not decide to stay in your dorm living room.

8. Talk to a wise person about how to preserve moss.

9. Fill a medium-sized planter with soil and lay your moss on top.

10. Take pictures of your moss samples and use Google Lens to identify what varieties they are.

11. Realize you still need five kinds of moss.

12. Take a walk through the woods in the rain to find more moss. (If you are also looking for simple plant examples for a science class, you may want to take a plant identification book with you. Since it is raining and you are carrying an umbrella, you may find that you do not have enough hands for your plant identification book when the time comes to put your dirty moss in your bag. This is when you put your plant identification book in your hood. Keep in mind that when you bend over, it will fall out.)

13. Take pictures of your new moss varieties and use Google Lens to identify them. Some of them will probably be the same as kinds you have already.

14. Look everywhere for two more kinds of moss, even on the pavement beside the school.

15. Ask a wise person if you will need something under the planter when you water your moss. They will say “no.” They are expecting that you are a sensible person who knows how much water a planter can hold.

16. Dump your entire water bottle over your moss because moss needs moisture to thrive.

17. Watch brown water ooze from the bottom of your planter and spread slowly over the study room floor.

18. Clean up the water. (Keep a rag under your planter for good measure.)

19. Identify your last two kinds of moss as something else Google Lens thinks they could be because you have probably found all the moss kinds in Pennsylvania already.

20. Make little signs with toothpicks, displaying your moss’s scientific name and the date that the samples were found.

21. Look at your lab collection instructions after you make the signs. You will find that the directions clearly state that you need the scientific AND the common name of whatever you collect.

22. Squish the common name printed in capital letters above the scientific name on each of your little white signs.

23. Hand in your moss collection and hope that it does not leak all over your teacher’s office, and that you will never see it again.