She spoke of how the water caught the light, how people were drawn to its flash and froth, “a zone of freshness,” she said, “of play.”

The scene might call to mind a time gone by, the passage of time, and our eventual decay. But what if you shifted your focus from the barn to the background—the field, the hills beyond. What might you see? What might you learn?

Perhaps you’d notice how the native vegetation took over the fallow field in the first ten years, and the new species of tr