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| Megan's signature self portrait. |
Last week I was with my daughter and her family in Maryland. One of the charms of her home is its proximity to extensive wooded areas and a small lake with wide paths around its shores. I think that she and her husband decided to buy the home because of the natural areas--one path leading right past her tiny back yard--rather than because of the home itself.
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| Lakeside view. Greenbelt, MD. |
Meg is a firm believer in "outside time." When her two children are cranky or out-of-sorts, she does not park them in front of a movie--like 99% of the mothers I know--she packs them a snack and they go for a long walk.
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| Megan Christina Rytting. |
Her 4-year-old Jon has a Nature Box where he can keep anything that he finds outdoors. During the walks we took, Jon would pick up cool looking rocks or leaves and tell us about them. Then, in a tone that indicated he had deliberated carefully, he would announce that he was NOT taking the item home to put in his Nature Box.
Megan would then respond "That's OK! It's OK to pick up something and look at it and then put it back."
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| Kate, two and a half years old, teething and with a cold. |
During most of these walks, Kate was sick with a bad cough, runny nose and congestion--on top of having her last two molars coming in. When she could breathe and wasn't coughing, she would chew on her fingers (sometimes gagging herself and then throwing up). So Orajel was added to the routine and that, along with a little frozen hand chewy, made life a little more bearable.
On the first morning I was there, we went shopping. Jon and Kate got to pick out a toy (Jon's was a monster truck and Kate's was a trio of small Hello Kittys, just the right size to fit into her hand.) When Jon was not looking, I picked up a box that contained 5 small monster trucks. He did see it after we had checked out--and even carried it home, worrying aloud the entire time who would get to have those trucks and if they belonged to everyone and when would we open them?
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| Jon with his new monster truck, Monster Mutt. |
For Jon, coming surprises cause an internal agony, rather than a happy anticipation engendered in most of us. Uncertainty in any form is horrible--he is only content when he knows where everything is, knows who is going to be around him, and knows what is coming next.
My own son Nathan shares that same characteristic. For years the most important issue of the day was "What are we having for dinner tonight?"
My original reason for starting this essay was to explain where I got flowers for a Botany class I'm taking on line. I found myself in Maryland during October--with no flowers at all around Megan's home.
BUT! Outside a restaurant we went to on my second night there, the grounds people had planted hedgerows of small, fragrant rose bushes. I helped myself to a few of them--reassuring Meg that I didn't need to ask the restaurant for permission since they would have no idea who actually planted them. The corporate owner's hired grounds keepers would have planted them, . . . and I rationalized that we were contributing to the financial coffers of the corporation by spending money for 4 at one of their renters . . . it would most probably not cause major problems for whoever was in charge if I snapped four of the tiny roses off of one bush.
I know, I know . . . if everyone took 4 roses, pretty soon there would be no roses at all . . .
One of those philosophic issues that keeps me from picking flowers in national and state parks or from picking up a pebble of petrified wood from the ground when we were at the a petrified tree site near Florissant, Colorado. It would also keep me from taking anything (but photographs) from a place like Stonehenge.
Anyway . . .
I had five wonderful days and now I have been home three days and am laying about in a gray fuzz because I have caught whatever flu or cold that Meg and her children had when I was there.
Thank goodness I am not teething, too.
