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This is the sort of day that I like - it's mostly grey and gloomy, but the rain is holding off. Since daylight savings time is over for another year, it feels like late afternoon already. I'm glad. I like the short, no-nonsense days and long, contemplative evenings November brings. I've always been a bit of a bookworm and I would breath a sigh of relief when I could read in peace. My dad didn't like me with my "face in a book all the time." He was convinced that it would stunt me in some essential way. He didn't have anything against reading exactly, but he had a lot against staying in the house when there was anything worth doing outdoors. We lived on a farm and there was always something worth doing. But when it got dark that was the end of his cries to "get yourself outside and get the stink blown off ya."
It was a very good place to grow up.
My dad often said, "Come here, I want to show you something" and he then he would reveal: a tree frog housed in a basket of hanging geraniums, a hole in the wood pile where rabbits disappeared, a tree split in two by lightening, the place where the creek overflowed and took away the plank we were using for a bridge, a hazelnut tree, a hill covered with trilliums, a worm in an apple he was eating, wild strawberries in an old graveyard, weirdly shaped fungus on a fallen log, a nest of baby mice, a kill-deer pretending to be injured, a snapping turtle more than a foot wide, wild leeks we could dig up and fry, an owl sleeping in the barn.
My childhood was rich and amazing, but nothing as fantastic as my dad's own. He and his brother had pet squirrels that lived in my grandfather's army duffel hanging in their back porch. He trained his dog to climb apple trees. He ate so many green pears that he was sick for a week. He attended a one room school. He went camping, by himself, for weeks at a time. He collected seed samples from over fifty different types of weeds, placed them in labelled glass vials and built a beautiful case to house them in.
It's sometimes difficult to make the three versions of my father (child, father, grandfather to my own children) merge into one person that I can point to and say: this man is my dad. I don't know that I really need to. Last summer I watched as he taught my then three year old son to entice a squirrel with peanuts for over two hours. He didn't seem to mind. The trust of squirrels is not something to be gained in an instant, nor the admiration of little kids. He let things take their natural course and at the end he had a squirrel eating nuts out of my son's hand.
That's what I want, I think. To never grow bored of the natural world, to constantly be thrilled by the things I find there and to share them with my kids. I'm still a bookish sort of person, but I think I'll scrape my plans to clean my desk and 'get some work done' tonight. There's still a tiny bit of light left at the end of the day and I think the whole family could use a good long stroll before winter really settles in.
We need the stink blown off of us.
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