Thankful for a Childhood in Nature

         This morning, the day before Thanksgiving, with eight inches of fresh beautiful white snow on the ground at my house, I'm thankful for snow. Its beauty in the silence of early morning reminds me how grateful I am for a childhood that taught me to use my senses.

        I was born on a California island, where the Pacific Ocean laid the cadence of its heartbeat over mine, but I spent a childhood in the South, where I learned to use my senses. The sense of smell, for instance, I learned to use on my grandparents' Kentucky farm—tobacco curing in barn rafters, barnyard manure of cattle and hogs, hay being baled in the fields—and at my home in the north Georgia woods, with the smell of sweet gum bark, sun warmed pine needles, and the heavy, damp moss I replanted in my secret rock garden. I knew the sweetness of wild azaleas from hiking on the Appalachian Trail, the fetid thick smell of the Okefenokee Swamp from canoeing there, and underground dankness form spelunking in Alabama caves. Now on the mountain where I have lived for almost five decades, I know the vivid fetid smell of Oregon grape blossoms, the vanilla smell of Pondrosa pine, the pungency of incense cedar, and the acrid stink of the stink bug.

          In my childhood my mother taught me to belong to the land by naming what I see and hear: a green figure in a green sheath—a jack-in-the-pulpit; a flash of red in a dogwood tree—a cardinal; a three-syllable whistle from the woods at dusk—a whippoorwill. From those lessons I learned to name my neighbors in nature on my mountain in Oregon: shooting star, pedicularis, ox-eyed daisy, Applegate paintbrush. I know the meadowlark's trill, the drumming of grouse, the whir of a rufous hummingbird in my honeysuckle. I know the barred owl sweeping through the firs, the great blue heron flying into my swimming hole, and the osprey splashing into a lake to rise with a fish.

          When my sisters and I caught a chameleon, my father showed us its color-changing magic. When we brought home from the woods a black and yellow, hard-shelled creature we called a turtle, he explained why it was a terrapin. When bees swarmed on a tree limb, he wiped them bare-armed into his hive, telling us, "Swarming bees don't sting." He taught us to recognize copperheads, black snakes, and garter snakes, to walk unafraid in the woods. Today, therefore, I honor the bears and cougars in my woods, the snakes in my garden, and the bats at my house. I swim in the cold mountain lakes of the wilderness as much at home as newts and dragonflies.

         During the barefoot summers of my Georgia childhood, I tread lightly on the earth, recognizing thorns and caterpillars before stepping on them, squishing my toes in the mud of warm summer rains. Here on the Oregon mountain, my foot recognizes sharp pebbles, the pointed tips of oak leaves, and the hard carapaces of scorpions and stink worms before it crunches down.

          After a childhood in the South, I returned, like migrating salmon and monarch butterflies, to the place where birth rhythms called—to the West Coast. In this almost half-century of living here in the Siskiyou Mountains, I have had reason, time and again, to recall these lessons of that childhood—lessons of nature and of the senses—and to be grateful for them, as they have been the foundation of my life.