I love your rambling and beautiful thoughts. Your writing is so evocative - I could hear the thrum of insects and the birds. So awful they sprayed it - no wonder you are feeling morose and nostalgic contemplating this.

"The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and a boys will is the winds will."

It's Henry Wadworth Longfellow, which I googled, but it's a gorgeous line. It reminds me of Frost's poem 'The Birches' where he comes across ice laden birches, and imagines they'd been swung on by a young boy, and then remembers himself having been a swinger of birches, and dreams of going back there to do so again, as life has got tough for him. He imagines letting go of earth for a while, and coming back down to start again, but then muses:

Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

I'm more positive - I'm sure the youth will turn toward the earth as they get tired of the useless things that distract them, just as you realised your prayers were just bouncing off the ceiling.

xx