The Beginning of a Love Affair with Nature

Those of us who cannot remember when we fell in love with nature—well, we’re the lucky ones.

Our very lack of memory points the way to events that precede our ability to speak in words.

Were you raised, as I was, with picture books, and a parent or other adult who patiently described the animals on the pages? Long before I held a field guide in my clumsy, childish hands, I was falling in love with mammals first, then birds, then insects, reptiles, and amphibians…

Maybe this describes you as well.

There is a family Kodachrome snapshot (now faded to yellow) of me at age 18 months, crawling on a sandy Michigan beach toward a turtle. Curious. Unafraid. An older cousin remembers me from that summer, remembers how I would name the birds I could see. Remembers me before I could remember myself. 

And so I think that, even before I could walk, perhaps from my stroller, I overheard my mom or dad enjoying a day of sunshine or the song of an oriole high in the drooping branches of an elm.

But…you know who else are the lucky ones?

The ones who remember the moment that the scales fell from their eyes.

My late husband was such a person. As a youth, he did have a relationship with the outdoors, mediated by fishing and hunting. But that was pretty much it.

Then one fine spring day, David, a freshly liberated U.S. Marine, was fishing a small Wisconsin stream during trout season opening.

He told the story this way, “All around me in the trees and shrubs along the stream were all these fantastically colored birds. Just dripping from the trees. I remember thinking: what are these? How come I have never noticed them before? I have to know what they are.”

Unbeknownst to him, he had found himself in a spring fall-out of warblers and other neotropical migrants.

Typical of his self-taught approach, David returned to town, went to his library and began systematically reading his way through ALL their books about birds.

In fact, one afternoon David was sitting by his window with a book by Arthur A. Allen, the first American professor of ornithology. He was immersed in a passage about the predaceous songbird, the loggerhead shrike.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bird whoosh by his apartment window. He leapt up and raced out the door. There, to his astonishment, was the very bird he was reading about, perched on the carcass of its house sparrow prey.

He told that story over and over. I prompted his retelling often. I never tired of hearing it, imagining the scene in my own mind. Sharing vicariously in that mystical experience.

And so, I tell it again, in his absence, to remind myself how vital such memories are to our very being. They stitch us to this earth and each other. They never grow old.

We who love nature all have memories of such moments tucked away in our minds. I think of them as the fine china and good crystal that bring everyday meals into our souls.

Like the good china, pull them out often (everyday isn’t too often).

Say to a companion, or perhaps just yourself: “I remember the time…”

See how that gladdens and nourishes your very being.

We who love nature, we are all the lucky ones.