Rusty Crayfish Seasons: When Life Brings Invasive Change

One summer the lake changed in a way no one expected. Ice fishermen had been using rusty crayfish as bait and simply dumped their leftovers into the water. These small creatures were not native. With no natural checks, they exploded in number.

The Summer Everything Changed

They devoured the underwater plants that sheltered young fish. The shoreline looked different. The fishing changed. Everything felt off-balance. My children were young then, and I watched as our familiar summer world shifted beneath us.

This kind of invasive change arrives in our lives too. A health diagnosis, a profound loss, a sudden transition in midlife—something enters that upends the ecosystem we thought we knew.

Working With What Is

We decided to work with what was. We caught crayfish by the bucketful, boiled them, picked the tiny bits of meat. It took enormous effort for very little reward, yet it became part of our summer rhythm. We stopped fighting the reality in front of us and began relating to it differently.

Life asks this of us sometimes. When change feels destructive, the path forward often involves working with what has arrived rather than wishing it away. This is where real adaptation begins.

Nature’s Remarkable Return to Balance

Years passed. The crayfish numbers slowly declined. The plants returned. The fish came back. The lake found a new normal—never the same as before, but alive and abundant again. Nature is remarkably good at finding the next right shape.

I carry this story with me through every season of disruption. Change is not the exception. It is the water itself. And something in us, like the lake, knows how to find balance again when we stop resisting what is.

Trusting the Process in Your Own Invasive Season

If you are in the middle of an invasive season right now, I see you. The familiar landscapes may look gone. The waters may feel unrecognizable. Trust that something is still working beneath the surface. One bucket at a time.

The lake taught me that new balance eventually emerges. Not by forcing the old way back, but by working with what has come. This wisdom feels especially alive in midlife, when so many changes ask us to adapt with grace and patience.