"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:21
My father often said that if he ever became rich he would quit his job and open a restaurant. When he described the restaurant it was not a restaurant at all but a ‘soup kitchen’, a place where people who were hungry could come and have warm food,conversation and companionship. As someone who had been a cook in the Navy, he was famous for his chili….that lasted for days because he never seemed to get that idea of ‘quantity’, that the family of five didn’t need the potful that would feed a fleet. I loved thinking of him in a little diner someplace cooking up pots of comfort for anyone who would walk in the door.
It is always a lively and telling conversation when people dream and discuss what they would do if they came into a fortune. Lottery winners often say they will continue their jobs. Some do. Others begin a spiral of out of control wealth that leads to some very sad times. Most often people will first buy their ‘dream car’, pay off a mortgage, take that trip of a lifetime, or secure their children’s college educations.Still others, like my Dad, dream of healing the hurts of others, providing for unmet needs, giving away what has been given to them as gift.
Few think of preserving the loon. But that’s just what Iva Weir did with her $1.8 million dollar bequest. Iva’s story made front page news today in Minnesota. Her schoolteacher’s salary fueled by frugal living allowed her, after her death, to leave this amazing amount of money to the Nature Conservancy in Minnesota for conserving the loon’s habitat. Her life long love of the Minnesota bird caused her to provide for its preservation upon her death. What an amazing act!
The loon is a fascinating bird. How many times we have sat on the dock at Papoose Lake watching them glide along the surface of the water, regal yet somehow down-to-earth. We have sat at a distance watching their nests in the reeds along water’s edge, hoping for signs of new life in the nest. I have wonderful memories of hot summer nights, lying awake listening to their mournful call echoing across the lake. Not to mention their wild and frenetic calls of love to one another in the wee hours of the morning. This sound, this bird is the pride of Minnesotans and yet our desire to be near the lakes we hold dear, to be near to these black, white and red-eyed wonders are actually threatening their survival.
And so the money given by a schoolteacher who shaped the lives of children will now provide for the on-going gift of safer nesting, more protected land, wilderness preserved. Iva’s love of loons has been a gift to our children’s children who will also lay awake, exhausted after a day of swimming, listening long and hard for that sound, that precious sound of the loon’s call. Iva’s treasure has been not only a gift to the loons but to us. My heart is full of gratitude.