Early Outdoor Memories
(Via grow this)
It was a perfect, quiet day, and the kids are skiing down the mountain – and they’ve got their headphones on. They can’t enjoy just hearing nature and being out there alone. They can’t make their own entertainment. They have to bring something with them”
- Richard Louv, in “The Last Child in the Woods” quoting a parent describing a recent ski trip with teenage children.
I’m reading “The Last Child in the Woods” which “explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change”. The author says that Baby Boomers (born 1946 and 1964) “may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water”. Here's me and the kid, communing with nature a few years ago. Ok, many years ago.
Before he gets to analysis and recommendations, he describes the richness of his own childhood, and his earliest memories of using his senses and “sensing wonder” which I think is Rachel Carson’s phrase.
It made me try to recall my earliest memories of the great outdoors. I think it must be rolling through the grass down an enormous hill in my front yard. Visiting the neighborhood years later, I was amazed to find that the hill is shorter and less steep than a flight of stairs. It must be about 4 feet long, on an incline that requires more than gravity to roll to the bottom. But it was Soooo big back then! I’m sure it was originally almost a hundred miles long, and steeper than mountains.
For me though, the sense of smell is my strongest connection to early childhood memories, and seeing blogger pictures of snow, I'm remembering the snows of my childhood. The closest I get these days to the snows of yesteryear is the realization that a killing freeze murdered my coleus - whose skeletons you can see in this picture.
I remember the smell of a smoke from chimneys when we were out in the snow. I remember the smell of melting, drying snow suits hanging in the basement laundry room after we came in from the snow. As everyone knows, puddles of melting snow beneath the basement clothes line smell different than puddles of regular water. I remember the earthy smell of wool scarves wound around my neck to cover your nose and mouth, after the scarves got caked in snow from snowballs my very accurate big brother threw.
What a shame if the generation of kids out skiing or sledding somewhere today will, years from now, associate nature with the play list they made for their iPod. What’s your earliest memory of using your senses out of doors?
It was a perfect, quiet day, and the kids are skiing down the mountain – and they’ve got their headphones on. They can’t enjoy just hearing nature and being out there alone. They can’t make their own entertainment. They have to bring something with them”
- Richard Louv, in “The Last Child in the Woods” quoting a parent describing a recent ski trip with teenage children.
I’m reading “The Last Child in the Woods” which “explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change”. The author says that Baby Boomers (born 1946 and 1964) “may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water”. Here's me and the kid, communing with nature a few years ago. Ok, many years ago.Before he gets to analysis and recommendations, he describes the richness of his own childhood, and his earliest memories of using his senses and “sensing wonder” which I think is Rachel Carson’s phrase.
It made me try to recall my earliest memories of the great outdoors. I think it must be rolling through the grass down an enormous hill in my front yard. Visiting the neighborhood years later, I was amazed to find that the hill is shorter and less steep than a flight of stairs. It must be about 4 feet long, on an incline that requires more than gravity to roll to the bottom. But it was Soooo big back then! I’m sure it was originally almost a hundred miles long, and steeper than mountains.
For me though, the sense of smell is my strongest connection to early childhood memories, and seeing blogger pictures of snow, I'm remembering the snows of my childhood. The closest I get these days to the snows of yesteryear is the realization that a killing freeze murdered my coleus - whose skeletons you can see in this picture. I remember the smell of a smoke from chimneys when we were out in the snow. I remember the smell of melting, drying snow suits hanging in the basement laundry room after we came in from the snow. As everyone knows, puddles of melting snow beneath the basement clothes line smell different than puddles of regular water. I remember the earthy smell of wool scarves wound around my neck to cover your nose and mouth, after the scarves got caked in snow from snowballs my very accurate big brother threw.
What a shame if the generation of kids out skiing or sledding somewhere today will, years from now, associate nature with the play list they made for their iPod. What’s your earliest memory of using your senses out of doors?
