Nature Walks

Talking nature walks can be a great way to teach young children about their environment and community. When I was little, I used to go out with a tiny hand basket to collect interesting leaves, rocks, stray flowers, and twigs I found on the way. My mother and I would keep a look out for colorful birds and listen for their songs, and Mom would point out trees in their various phases of budding, flowering, and turning colors in the autumn. She'd tell me about the grass and the trees and the sky and the clouds and how it all came together to work as one sustainable ecosystem. Under her loving supervision, I learned about how clouds made rain and how the trees and plants around me used that water along with sunlight to make energy for themselves. She showed me where the mosses and lichens fit into that world of green, and together we watched the coming and goings of the insects and spiders that made a home for themselves on our block. One day each week for an entire year, we walked around the corner to the tree where the ladybugs came to mate and lay their eggs, and once we spotted the first egg, we came back every day to see if we could catch them hatching into larvae.

I still remember the summer a rather hardy spider spun a web in the space between a small stone pillar and a neighbor's picket fence. It's been a great many years since I last saw that spider, and I know that in all likelihood she's long since perished, but some part of me wants to believe that she's still out there, spinning spindly little webs in small, dark places.

I also remember the day we found a half-eaten cupcake about half a block from our house. It was crawling with ants, and my three-year-old self was completely and utterly captivated. I could hardly believe that such tiny creatures could disassemble a piece of food many hundreds of times larger than themselves. Somehow, they managed it, and when we went back a few hours later at my insistence, all that was left of the abandoned treat was a stained wrapper and a dozen straggler ants who hadn't realized the feast was over.

As I grew older, we still went on walks together in the gentler months of the year. Occasionally we found a pinecone or some other such treasure. We may have even borrowed a fig or two from the tree a few blocks north of here, but nothing has ever been conclusively proven on that matter.

Nowadays, those nature walks are some of my best childhood memories. My mom could have sat me down with some dusty old book about trees or handed me the TV remote, but she didn't. Instead, she chose to bundle me up in my coziest sweater and arm me with a tiny hand basket so we could discover the splendor of the natural world together, as a family.