Beech Tree News Network

A few days ago, I watched a video of Greg and Renee Hampton’s granddaughter, Laney, watching a lady bug.  Her interest was intense, her fascination genuine.  She called, “Come back!” as the little bug crawled away.  It was a reminder of the vast playground that nature provides all children.
When my parents’ generation was growing up, times were hard and money was scarce, which meant toys were even scarcer.  My mother-in-law, Agnes, remembers how she and her sisters wove leaves together by their stems to make aprons when they played.  Once, Agnes was given a doll by a teacher who adored her, but she was never allowed to play with it, because she had several sisters who had never had a doll, and Agnes’ mother didn’t think it would be fair for only one child to have something special.  The doll perished in a fire that took the family’s home before Agnes was grown.
 J.D., Garey’s dad, made his own sling shots from small, forked tree limbs and any piece of discarded rubber he could find.  My dad stumbled upon a dead hawk when he was a boy, and used the talons on the foot and the tendon in the leg to make a grabber of sorts.
 My generation had more toys than my parents ever thought about having, and still we played with stuff we found on the ground or in the woods or around the barn.  Garey and his cousin, Sammy, “mined” a small seam of white clay, located in a ditch near his home.  They saved Black Cat firecrackers from the Fourth of July and used them as miniature sticks of dynamite to “blast” the clay from its foundation.  “Other kids lit their firecrackers and ran,” Garey told me, “Sammy and me used ours for something destructive.”
My cousins and I rode barrel horses, and I don’t mean horses that race around barrels.  They were oil barrels tipped over on their sides, with grass strings attached as reins.  My sisters and I played under massive oak trees with exposed roots.  The roots were our room dividers.  We gathered grass, nuts and seeds and put them into discarded jars as our “canned vegetables.”  To this day, I can point out the plant with the long stem bearing small green seeds that served as my green peas.  It’s funny, but when I tried bringing my inside toys outside to incorporate into my imaginative world, it wasn’t the same.  They just didn’t mesh.  The dolls were too plastic, the plates and cups too sterile.  The burlap bag baby, leaf plate and walnut hull cup just felt at home beneath the oak tree.
  By the time my kids came along, with their gazillion toys, I had already realized that nothing I could give them would hold a candle to what they would find outside.  The picture I carry in my mind of my daughter, Nikki, is of a little girl in rubber boots, with a net in one hand and a bucket in the other.  She was always out on the farm looking for anything alive and small enough to fit into that bucket.  She brought home tadpoles, turtles and snakes, which sometimes, unbeknownst to me, ended up in an aquarium in her room.  She, like her father before her, mined for clay and stored that in her room as well.  She and her friend, Sheena Saddler, would play “alligator” on the pond bank then come back to the house and hose off.  You know, none of that ever bothered me—the dirt and mud and general disarray.  I think it’s because it was happening in God’s house, and he didn’t seem to mind the mess.
I went outside with my granddaughter this week.  The first thing she did was pick up two sticks.  She gave me one and kept the other for herself.  Before she got onto her sliding board, she placed the stick on the ground.  When she was finished sliding, she picked her stick up again.  She held on to it while she fed corn to the horses.  When we were ready to go inside, she placed the stick back onto the ground in the front yard where she had found it.  Even at two years old, she knows the magic belongs outside.