I can see grass this week. I know, amazing! The snow has now melted. I hope it will stay away, but I have my doubts. This past weekend, my baby brother Joe and my friend Ron went out and played in the snow. The sun was shining bright and therefore it was relatively warm out, on the other hand the snow was still piled high. It was pretty much perfect weather for playing in the snow. Joe asked if he could go out and play in the snow and I said to go for it. Ron and I ended up following him out to play too. I am a wimp though so I mainly took photos. Joe and Ron tried carving a cave into a big pile of snow but it was rock hard so it ended up with them throwing snow balls at each other. Not sure which one of them had the advantage. Little Joe was able to climb on top of the snow piles and throw snow down on Ron. However, Ron was able to take shovels full of snow and toss them on Joe’s head… It was great fun to watch and my brother had a ball!
I remember those days where I would see a pile of snow or dirt and then want to jump in it and play. I wonder why we lose that. Or does everyone? I used to spend as much time as humanly possible by the river behind our home. My friends and I would dig in the mud for the clay and get filthy but have something that sort of resembled a bowl by the end. We would sit there with sticks over the water with sting on the end fishing, even though we knew there was no way a fish would bite a string with no hook or bate. We would wade through the creek and rivers and make little make-shift houses with old sheets and pretend to live there. We created our own world in those woods. We created a simple world, one that consisted of just us kids, the woods, the water and the animals. Those days playing in the woods are some of the happiest of my childhood. I do not know how or when I lost the ability to play that way. I do remember coming back to visit my old friends a couple summers after leaving that home and they wanted to go play in the creek again. We went out to play and something had changed. I went from wanting to dive into the filth of the natural world to becoming afraid of it. They teased me, of course, but I could not help my fear.
I wonder when that transition occurred to make me fear the outdoors that was once a magical world to me. I see it with my brothers. Sam sees the outdoors as an uncomfortable place whereas Joe sees it as a place of adventure and happiness. Does a lot of it have to do with our age or our individual personality? Maybe part of it is that we are taught to fear the ‘wild’. To this day I am terrified of snakes, even ones I know are completely harmless and I know this fear comes from our society teaching us to fear them. I still wonder why my attitude towards nature seemed to change so dramatically from childhood to now.
“But learning is inevitable if one is open to the risk of making mistakes.”
- Carl Anthony and Renée Soule
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