Walking Children in Nature

For the longest time, I thought I was an indoor kid. I would stay at my grandparents’ farm and instead of going out and getting muddy on the tractor with my grandfather like my little sister did, I would go to the library with my grandmother and check out an armload of books and as many VHS movies as humanly possible. What I didn’t realize then that you don’t have to actually be outside all the time to appreciate and love nature.

There are times, more and more frequently these days, that I just want to go completely off the grid on that farm so badly. Build a little cabin back in the woods with a giant solar array, plant a garden with fruits and vegetables, learn how to hunt (or maybe just stay vegetarian). Find a spot for a hammock where I can read physical books and nap intermittently, set up a writing desk on the porch or by a window with stacks of notebooks and refillable pens of all kinds, spend my days walking the world around me, wandering up and down hills and hollers but never far enough to where I can’t find my way home.

It seems so simple, so perfect, so easy, so natural. Returning myself to the land while still allowing myself the analog comforts of civilization and agriculture. Another fairy tale I tell myself, like that of outer space. A myth of myself as an outdoors woman, a rugged naturalist, chiseled and slender with strong thighs and sun damage on my nose and cheeks but with no mirror to really see or care about it.

The truth is that I would probably not survive even the most simple return to nature unless my life actually depended on it. I love to sit outside and listen to trees and feel breezes, but I like to come inside when I need to, when it’s cold and chill creeps its way through my bones, or its hot and I feel exhausted just breathing, or it’s raining and I feel like I may never truly be dry ever again. I love to go to the beach, to sit by the ocean, to lie on the sand, but I need a towel or chair underneath me, SPF 50+ to prevent myself from roasting, and an eBook to keep me company under the umbrella.

Right now it feels like the world is ending, but in the slowest way possible — truly not with a bang but with a whimper until it bubbles up to sobs and screams we can no longer avoid and have no way to remedy, either.

We’ve been getting early and late heavy snowstorms in our mostly temperate Midwestern river valley more often–early November for the past several years, April last year. White Christmases feel like an old-fashioned concept.

A couple of years ago we sat outside on my parents’ patio on Christmas Day, and my mother leaned her face up to the sky and exalted in the sun. She’s a true outdoor kid out of necessity, one who worked on a farm almost daily throughout her childhood until she went to college, and she marveled at how nice it felt to be sitting outside together at the end of December. I shared her sentiment at first until I realized what it meant, what we were basking in.

Even Januarys are no longer really “winter,” it seems — mostly it feels like winter in general is torrential rain nonstop for days at a balmy 60 degrees or so, while we hold our breath to see what kind of blizzard and ice February or March, or now April, may or may not bring.

My spouse and I haven’t traveled much over the last 19 months, only a couple of times to cabins in mountain areas within driving distance for long weekends at most. We were supposed to go to Hawaii for the first time in July of 2020, cancelled for obvious reasons, and there’s no indication of when or if we might ever get to actually go. I took a solo trip myself recently to another cabin in a wooded hilly spot, and it wasn’t so much a return to the splendor of nature as I’d hoped (more on this whole thing in an upcoming post). But for most of my life, so many of my experiences with nature have been contained, restrained by vacation parameters, bordered by rules and boundaries and easy escape plans.

Not only would optional subsistence probably not be ideal for me, but I doubt I would survive on my own in the actual wild, too. When I feed my cats soft food, I wonder if I would be able to eat it along with them whenever the human food runs out after the last nuclear blast destroys the coasts and radioactive flyover country is all that’s left.

I have a weird fascination of relatively new-ish (built less than 100 years ago) buildings that have been recently reclaimed by nature, instead of torn down and replaced, but that fascination is tempered when I pause to think about what it will actually feel like when houses next door to mine or across the street sit abandoned and moss-covered, tree branches sprouting up strong through shattered windows. Will we still be here in our own moss-covered ruins of Just Doing What We Can to Get By in The World, finally not feeling annoyed by our retired neighbors using power tools and landscaping equipment at 8 am on Saturday mornings?

What’s more, for all my theoretical love of nature, I have never been able to keep plants alive in my care. I usually kill them first by overwatering, and then by lack of watering when I realized I’ve overdone it. If that’s not a metaphor for the rest of my life — overdoing it with good intentions and then making it exponentially worse by withdrawing too much — I don’t know what is. I know I need more nature in my life, as evidenced by the ultra-bright Seasonal Affective Disorder light (aka the SAD lamp) I sit in front of for an hour each morning when the winter days are short and dim and cold. I know I need to go and to be outside more while I can, while there’s still time, no matter how sweaty I get, no matter how many bugs decide to feast on me.

Right now the closest I get to extended time in nature is through my yard, the peak of suburban unnecessary-ness. But until I had a house of my own, I never had to care for a yard or a garden or flowers. I never trimmed bushes or weeded or raked leaves or planted herbs — my dad handled all of it with meticulous precision.

I’ve handled the lawn myself for upwards of two years now, because my spouse hates yard work after years of his own childhood spent mowing lawns and I not-so-secretly love it. I’ve gotten better at it than when I first started years ago, and can move at quicker pace when absolutely necessary, but I’m still often uneven with my mowing, the lines slanting or arcing gently instead of neat parallel or perpendicular. But there honestly isn’t much in the world that I find more deeply satisfying than that simple act of cutting the grass, the instant gratification of the shaggy before and the trimmed after.

And while I realize that once-weekly lawn maintenance is probably not the right level of natural abundance I need in my life, it is something.

It’s me outside, breathing the air, soil and greenery beneath my feet, sweating and uncaring, mind focusing on one simple task and only that simple task, loud music in my earbuds to drown out the drone and keep me on task with the right BPMs to bop to. I try to alternate zig-zag angles weekly between the front and back, but sometimes I make a weird little spiraling concentric square in our small self-contained back yard, overlapping more than I probably should. I still haven’t fully mastered the weed-whacker as of this year — it sits awkwardly on my hip and wears my arm out and requires extremely non-ergonomic twisting of my short limbs around my long torso to truly get everything, but I didn’t break the tiny plastic thread that does the actual trimming last used I did it, so I’m taking that W.

I know it’s not a lot of nature for someone who sits at a desk all day, indoors all week, in front of endless screens for both work and entertainment. But again: it’s something. It’s my little square of nature in a world that seems to be both out to get us in the most nonchalant ways and continually wasting away at our negligence, and if I can keep some of that square alive along with myself and my loved ones, then there might be hope for me in this world yet.