Oh, the joys we are missing just off of life's beaten path
/The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham
It has been the nicest spring, more sun than rain, more warmth than cold, April showers bring May flowers, a little behind the curve. April's been full of flowers, the kind you plant and the kind that pop up all over the place all by themselves.
They're my favorite kind. Oh, I love the tended gardens packed with daffodils and tulips and deep purple anemones, and I recognize the industry behind all the pruned trees and fertilized lawns. But what I like best are the untended places where life just happens, not to dazzle anyone, not to turn heads, but just because.
Most of what used to be woodsy places in my town are town houses now or pampered lawns on which some gargantuan house sits. You have to look hard to find a small piece of untouched earth. Landscapers have domesticated nature, big old climbing-trees are as scarce as laughing young children shouting and playing tag or hide-and-seek on a modern cul de sac. The kids are somewhere else - inside on the computer or outside at some field playing some organized sport, and all the trees are small and new and planted in rows.
The freedom that was childhood nature has been tamed and tended to fit a neat mold. And the mold is great and sometimes even spectacular. Our lawns are edged, our children occupied. And yet . . .
On the path where I walk the dog, once a thick wood, now just a walkway rimmed with expensive homes, life untamed continues to sprout in the shadows, underneath and behind dead things, next to trees done in by winter or disease, in the shade next to sturdy ones. Saplings, growing too close to one another, manage to survive. Tiny green things inching up through rocky ground push their way toward the light. And in the midst of this, this spring, there is a cluster of daffodils, bright and yellow and perky, in full bloom in the middle of a pile of dead leaves.
No one planted them. No one tended them. Yet here they are, dazzling, like a group of girls who took a wrong turn on their way to a prom.
My best friend, Rosemary, and I spent our childhood in woods, tripping over things like this, first in the woods behind the Tower Hill School, when we were very young, then in the woods behind the School for the Deaf. We built a bridge out of dead branches to walk across a stream that wasn't a foot deep or more than 4 feet wide, that we could have walked through any time, but didn't, because the building of the bridge consumed us. We were 10, 11, 12 and 13. We built that bridge again and again, bigger bridges, better bridges every spring until summer came and the stream dried up. Then we crossed over into the deeper woods, away from everyone and everything and sometimes we sat and talked in an opening, but most times we continued on to the pond full of lily pads, where we'd chuck stones. Then up the path to the end of the woods and to the school, where there was always silence, to the tree we called our tree because in its shade we sat and talked and dreamed for hours and days and years.
"Hurry up," I heard a mother say to her son at a hockey rink earlier this week. It was school vacation. Mothers were busy taking their kids everywhere. "If you don't hurry we won't be able to stop at McDonald's before your baseball practice." That's life today: Hockey. Baseball. Soccer. Every minute of every day with something to do.
I look at the playgrounds in the schools and in people's back yards and I think, Rosemary's father took an old tire and hung it from a tree. That was our swing. I look at activity calendars taped on kitchen walls and I think we had no activity calendars because we had no activities. We wallpapered a chicken coop one summer and turned it into a doll hospital. We filled up balloons with water and pretended they were our sick dolls. We made medicines out of flowers and leaves, and boats out of paper and floated our boats in puddles. We had nothing but we had everything because we had imagination and time and freedom.
Life is more structured these days. And busier. Children don't play; they compete. And they compete in the spotlight, everything they do moderated and scored. Freedom? It's limited too. Parents want to know where their children are. Who can blame them? The world is a dangerous place, too dangerous to let a child go walking in the woods. But, oh, what children are missing off the beaten path, and what we are missing too: the discovery of things unseen in groomed gardens, the glimpse of things you don't learn on a team.
For it's untended places where life just happens that living things have room to grow.
