To This Day I Remember

One of the key factors that affect children’s development identified by Sue Palmer in Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It (Orion Publishing Company; www.orionbooks.co.uk) is: “The amount of time spent outdoors, especially in natural settings.” This factor is also the driving force behind the World Forum Foundation's project, the Nature Action Collaborative for Children (for more information, go to www.WorldForumFoundation.org/nature).

My memories of a New England kidhood in Clinton, Maine, include a large share of natural settings. These memories from the late 1930s and throughout World War II include mostly unstructured (except by us children) activities in a small town in rural Maine. We had natural materials, we witnessed the differences the seasons brought to the environment, and we had the freedom with which to experience them all.

Mostly I remember the mud! When spring comes to northern New England in the U.S., everything begins to melt after the winter-long sub-freezing, often sub-zero, temperatures. The mud was glorious and learning to “cook” by forming mud patties and “baking” them in the sun was our experience of water play, clay materials, and the earth. No one told us about all the natural materials as I recall. The earth was there for us and we played in it.

There was water. We lived near a brook — the Tannery Brook because there was a real tannery that dumped its waste into it. If anyone complained about that toxic experience, I have no memory of it. Here was where we learned about the “ripple effect” when you tossed a stone into the water and watched the stone sink and the spreading waves extend to the narrow banks. In winter, we walked across its 20-foot breadth because, of course, it was frozen solid. In the summer, we wrinkled our noses because as the water level dropped, the smells from the tannery were quite evident. We climbed the willows along its banks and dared to get our feet wet without parents ever finding out!

The brook emptied into Sebasticook River into which we cast our Memorial Day parade flowers every 30^th of May. The currents carried the bouquets and blossoms downstream where they eventually entered the Kennebec River and then disintegrated into the water and the riverbank. A curious child asked where have all the flowers gone and learned about another cycle of life. In the winter, much to my high anxiety, my father drove our car out onto the river! The foot or so of ice also supported a large truck into which blocks of ice were loaded for storage in an icehouse for use later on in the year. If the truck was safe, my father counseled, then we were, too. However, I still remember the edginess of driving a car onto a river that I knew was under there somewhere!

Our side of the street had no sidewalk, but when the ice and snow melted, a river of water ran down the hill from my grandparents’ house. We learned what floated and what sank and how long a paper boat (today it’s called origami) would hold up before becoming a soggy mess. On my grandparents’ property right next door to my house (I lived in an extended family on a compound my first 10 years and was in my thirties before I learned about extended families) was a fresh water spring in which grew the magnificent water lilies that Claude Monet painted in the 19^th century. The spring was very deep and fenced in; I was NEVER allowed inside the fence without another person. And I never opened the gate by myself. But with every visit to Giverney, Monet’s home north of Paris, I remember those pink, yellow, and white water lilies.

To this day, I remember the physical experience of climate and weather and how unstructured our playtime was. We had to be home by dark in the summer. We watched fireflies blinking their “tail-light neon,” and we grew up by the calendar, the holidays, and our games. Now it is our turn to give children opportunities to experience natural settings and all the activities that go with them. We need to give our children the gift of the calendar, holidays, and the games they will carry with them into their future.

Contributed by Edna Ranck

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