My eyes closed, nearly drifting off to sleep, I startle, awakened by a creaking noise. Is it one of the kids’ doors? Is one of them up, perhaps to go to the bathroom? Listening closer, room still dark, I strain to hear. The noise occurs again, but I can locate it just outside our window. “It’s the blueberry bushes, scratching the house,” I reassure myself. But some part of me doesn’t accept that answer and keeps listening anyway – just in case.
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1958? Wow, I didn’t think this book was that old, I thought as I looked at the title page of the classic children’s book Beezus and Ramona. Ramona’s four year old behavior – eating one bite out of each apple in a bag, writing her name on every page of a library book – seems just as relevant 65 years later as it did then.
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My children are dandelions. They are not sturdy, resilient standbys like tulips or delicate, like orchids.
My dandelion children are wild and bright, standing out in the manicured environments that society so often shoves us into.
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Endless hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding; astronomically high prices and low wages; biodiversity collapse – is this the future you expect for your kids in 30 years? For many of us concerned about climate change and social inequality, it seems like the future is going to be pretty grim. Some people are even going so far to think we’re going to be living in something out of a dystopia SF novel (if we’re not already).
But while being prepared for a legit natural or human-caused disaster is a good thing, hunkering down in despair isn’t. Honestly, our children deserve for us to at least try to turn this ship in the right direction. No one wants to tell their kids, “We didn’t bother trying because what was the point?”
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40. 40 years old.
It doesn’t even make sense as an age to me. It’s terribly cliched to say that “of course I don’t think of myself as 40” – but yeah, I don’t.
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“I’m sorry – what was your name again?” I asked the man sitting next to me at the community meeting.
“Luis,” he replied, then gestured. “Remember, I asked you about hosting the neighborhood pantry?”
“Oh, right!” I recalled. “I’m sorry – I’m really bad at both faces and names.”
I’ve had some variation on this conversation dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
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Watching our rabbit sniff and scratch at the floor, I wonder what he’s experiencing.
From reading Ed Yong’s brilliant book An Immense World, I know our rabbit’s sight alone is far different from ours. Rabbits don’t have the cone in their eyes that distinguishes between green and red, so they’re essentially red/green colorblind. Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, they have much better peripheral vision than we do, but don’t see particularly well straight in front of them. And that’s just vision – his sense of smell and hearing is likely far different from mine in a way that’s hard to comprehend.
Yong talks about how we try to force our sensory experiences onto other animals and assume they experience the world how we do.
But the fact is, we do it with people too. I just have to put on my husband’s glasses to be reminded of how radically different the visual world is for him. (I have glasses too, but I merely get a headache without them – he can barely see a couple of feet in front of him.) Or watch my kids slosh the unicorn slime from hand to hand that touching it makes me shudder. While all humans have approximately the same sensory systems, we still have radically different experiences of how our bodies take in and process that information.
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“Nothing is wasted in nature,” I whispered to myself as I dumped moldy strawberries in our composter.
I despise wasting food. There are so many things wrapped up in the production of our food – from how farm workers are treated to the amount of fertilizer used – that throwing it away feels a bit like sacrilege. But we bought far too much for our Christmas fruit salad and the extra got shoved back in the fridge with the other holiday leftovers. So into the composter it had to go.
I at least had the solace that this food wouldn’t be wasted – it would break down into good compost to feed our garden next fall. Just like the fallen leaves in the forest feed the insects and fungus, which in turn feed the roots of the trees and other plants.
In fact, this is idea that nothing is wasted in nature is a mantra I’ve been trying to adopt in life far beyond our composter.
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Reading the plaque on the wall at the National Children’s Museum, I raised an eyebrow. I had been looking around while my kids climbed on the huge structure rising up two stories in the middle of the museum. The sign on the wall caught my eye, so of course I read it. It had a little blurb about the skills children would learn from using said giant climbing structure – like problem solving and teamwork – and careers that used those skills. Although I was nodding along at first, I stopped and thought, “Wait a minute! Why are we so worried about them learning specific skills, much less for a career? Why can’t we just let them play?”
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Whoooooo loves reading Mo Willems books to their kids? Props to my local library for setting up this adorable little scene behind the check-out counter!
I talked to one of the librarians and she said that it just happened to come together organically – someone left the book there after story time, someone else put the big owl there, then someone fished the glasses out of Lost and Found and put the little owl next to the big one.
It just shows that creating little bits of magic and wonder don’t have to be a big, preplanned thing. Magic and wonder will show up if you keep your eyes open for them, whether that’s my younger son playing “monster school” or pretending to shoot each other with laser beams on a spaceship.