SPRING has arrived! I have no sound of the birds, the breezes and the myriad of other delightful sounds that are so gentle to the ear and so healing to the soul; nor do I have a bunch of pictures of flowers blooming in beautiful gardens, lending their sweet fragrances to the warm air, to share with you today... all I have is this photograph and thoughts of what a beautiful day it was to be sitting out in the deck doing some things I would normally have been doing indoors. The sun was so warm and the breezes so gentle that it was like being on vacation without having to go anywhere, except out the door, in my shorts and T-shirt, for a change.
I felt a oneness with life around me, as I had as a child. I became so keenly aware of tiny little things that adults tend to overlook. When I was young, I was outdoors most of the time, and not because my parents told me to be, but because for me, THAT was my HOME, and a house was that place to retreat to when I got cold or it was raining, to share family gatherings, and to sleep in without having to be concerned about bugs and night creatures bothering me... or worse!
On those days, when we didn't have to be somewhere else, NATURE was HOME.
When I was very young, my older brother would usually go visiting with the bigger kids in a neighbor's yard, but my younger brother and I would go to the sandpile by the swingset to visit the little world we had created the day before, to see what of it had survived the night... often finding deer tracks in the soft, dewy sand. The little world we had created the day before often seemed to stay intact until the sun overhead caused it to crumble about mid-day. But if it was warm enough, we were allowed to use the gardenhose to make a new world... with lakes and streams that ran freely as long as the garden hose was left on at a trickle. With an old kitchen sifter, we would sort the pebbles from the sand, gather up tiny twigs and grasses to begin to construct our new world. Little cereal boxes would become houses, and we used things from our selection of cars and miniature people and animals to add life to it.
On very hot days we were allowed to shower one another with a spray from the gardenhose, or to wade in the nearby stream... and sometimes my mother would hook the hose to a peak on the swingset to shower us as we went down the slide or rode the swings. But at other times we rode our bicycles, had adventures in the nearby woodlands, planted flowers with my grandmother, played in puddles in the dirt driveway, or shot marbles. Sometimes HE would go with a neighbor boy to catch frogs and let them leap about on the screened porch til suppertime ( YUCK! ) or I played HOUSE with my dolls and their furniture on the side lawn while they played cowboys and Indians, though sometimes I played too... as Annie Oakley or Pochahontas. (One time we created a teepee from long sticks, old bedspreads, a length of rope and a hammer and brads! ) Sometimes we sat on the screened in front porch and played board games, or colored in our coloring books, painted with our watercolors, or drew pictures on our pads, all afternoon. At other times, we sculpted things from clay as we sat on the steps of the back porch with a friend or two, and my mother would emerge now and then to fill our glasses with Kool-Aid and offer us homemade popsicles.
But there were so many things that our sences were taking in in addition to the things we were doing. The many different sounds and fragrances, the textures of things, the colors and shadows... the way the sun moved across the sky, filtered through the leaves, glinted on the surface of the stream, and made rainbows in the spray from the gardenhose... the way the mudpuddles would become all lined with a thin layer of silky mud that would stick to your finger when you touched it... and how the sun glared off every surface it touched, in mid-summer... the smoothness of this stick and the roughness of that one... and the way the bark peeled off another leaving it shiny and naked, while making a nice little bark roof for a house yet to be built in the sandpile.
Everything was perceived in those terms...with life being as a story book and each hour was turning a new page, creating itself, and us adding our touches to it. Every sence was keen in discerning the subtle differences and the wide variety of them... sight, smell, sound, touch, taste.... size, shape, number ... THAT is a Robin's call. THAT is a crow... THOSE are OAK trees... THOSE are POISON OAK trees! Mmmm Smell the LILACS... MMMM the Lily of the Valley... The hot dry sand, the cool moist mud....YUM! Grape jelly... YUM! Peanut butter! I have ten marbles; you have ten too! They are so ROUND and smooth colourful! The shooter is BIG the others are SMALL... Life was never boring, and there was always something to do... and to look foreward to doing... Even if only sitting and experiencing it, and listening to your own heartbeat, and breath going in and out, and the goose bumps on your arm where the rain has moistened it and the breeze has touched it...... because nature, and nature in us, is always doing a different dance, every minute, of every hour, of every day...
From mid-Spring til late Autumn, often, when the days were "mine", I even had lunch outdoors. A quick breakfast and "out the door" til suppertime, except to dash in to use the bathroom, or to get some toy or other. Often, on very hot summer days I would lay on a blanket on lush grass, under a tree and read books listening to the breezes in the tree tops, the birds calling to one another from distances, and the murmer of a nearby stream. The coolness of a breeze from deep within the woodslands, and of the earth beneath me was soothing.
But, sometimes, I would go indoors and lay on my bed to read, loving the flowing curtains flittering, like little kites, in the breeze that blew in through open windows. The scent of the fresh air in contrast to the smells of the indoors... of my beadspread and fresh linens, and the paper in the books, the musty warm scent of the attic above me, and perhaps my mother cooking something for supper in the kitchen below, were like the best of both worlds. I would hear the songs of the birds and the rustling of the leaves OUT THERE, and the sounds of the distant radio playing melodic songs, and of my mother humming as she did light housework, and sometimes the whirring of an electric fan, and the clatter of her Singer sewing machine, down the hall when she was sewing something in her little nitche, at the end of the hall.
Of course, we sang songs, pranced and ran and threw stones, told jokes and riddles, and shared fears and dreams, and made up stories as if the days were pages on which we could create whatever world our imaginations could conjure... and...... we did...
We created our world as surely as an artist paints a picture.... and in the creating, and later in gazing upon it, lives in it.... Just as the painter is aware of every brush stroke and the various colours, textures and hues needed to create the subject desired, and the whole picture as they imagined it.... but WE used ALL our sences and applied all of them to our creation. We knew it wasn't THE REAL WORLD, yet in a way, it was... just as the painting is real... though at the end of the day, THIS painting was kept only in our minds and hearts, with only an ocassional photograph or drawing to remind us of it in the future.
And today, I opened that treasure box of my memories, as I sat on the deck with my colored pencils and paper, serenading the trees, and filling myself with THE LIGHT FROM ABOVE...
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