Growing up on two acres next to a lake in upstate New York, I spent many hours outside. Pretending there was quicksand in the reeds, I wandered next to the stream that bordered our property. I waded along the mossy seawall and looked under rocks for crawfish. If you asked, I could tell you which was the weeping willow and which was the tall evergreen tree, their shade and green shadow leaning over the clear water. I knew birches, maple trees, roses, peonies, tulips, daffodils, lilacs. I caught salamanders, frogs and water striders. Otherwise, about nature, I was rather ignorant. Thinking they were blackberries, I picked black raspberries that grew along a chain link fence, the boundary to our neighbour’s lawn. Thinking they were dying in our stream, I “rescued” spawning carp by carrying them in a net and dumping them back in the lake.
Naming the natural world is knowing it. Acquiring this practical knowledge depends on other adults who wander along, point and name. Mom usually stayed up by the house – cooking or doing chores or reading her newspaper and library books. My knowledge of the natural world was accidental. Unlike my own children, I never learned about nature at school unless it was in a science textbook.
Our family moved to Europe after we were displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. My children were little when we moved overseas, and I rediscovered nature nearly every day because we didn’t have a car. On daily walks with my daughters, we learned to spot chestnut blossoms, weeping birches and elderflower trees; we played Narnia around old gnarly, knobby trees; quietly giggling, we hid from passersby under arched cherry tree branches, heavy with blossoms whose fleetingness heightens their beauty. We walked through long grasses and stumbled on stinging nettle.
Trudging through the everyday trenches of motherhood, I accessed some old European mother knowledge passed down through the centuries: a British mother told me about a leaf that grows next to every stinging nettle that relieves the sting. A German mom noted that fennel tea calms a tummy ache and another explained that a chopped onion wrapped in a warm towel soothes an earache. I relied on these gems of practical knowledge for my four daughters: Addy, Cecilia, Eva and Lily.
My daughters had the good fortune to receive their early education in the public school in Stadecken-Elsheim, Germany, where being in nature and learning about her is the central focus. By contrast to American children, German children do not learn the alphabet and Math in kindergarten. Instead, they learn to get along with other people and with nature.
One afternoon, I was walking with my eldest, Addy, who was about nine years old, across a grocery store parking lot. As we began our ascent up a cobblestone hill, she stopped, crouched to pick up tree seedlings. “Oh, I need these!” she said, stuffing them into her pocket.
“What for?” I asked.
“Stella and I are doing a report on birch trees,” she explained. I looked around and saw no other sign of a birch tree. We retraced our steps back around the corner we had just turned. I looked up and saw a slender white trunk, a quiet unnoticeable birch, nearly obscured by the grocery store building.
In German elementary schools, children have a subject called, Sachunterricht, a word that literally translates to “instruction of stuff.” There is no English translation because, to my knowledge, we English speakers don’t have this subject. A cross between science and social studies, Sachunterricht focuses on thematic units and student research and presentations. Some of the “stuff” that my daughters collectively learned about during their elementary school years include: trees, grains, herbs, whales, zebras, potatoes, apples. Even in second grade, they went into great depth and spent weeks acquiring hands-on knowledge: they went apple picking; held a potato festival; took the bus to the forest; hiked around town in search of herbs, picking the edible ones and returning to school to make and eat herb-butter and herb-quark on bread. From an early age, children learn about nature’s offerings.
From Cecilia, when she went out searching for and collecting elderflower with her kindergarten, I learned that elderflower blossoms are edible. After their hike, the children dipped the flowers in pancake batter for frying and eating.
From Addy, I learned about the fraudulent cuckoo. As we rode along the bike path one Sunday afternoon, next to a stream, through a wooded area, far from the road, she identified its call from the trees because her class had been studying about the forest. All I had known up to this point about the cuckoo was the artificial oo—uuu call and its popping out of a Black Forest clock on the hour while the woodcutter and his wife clinked their beer steins together.
But she knew about the real cuckoo – the parasite who deceives even before its birth: the mother lays her baby in a bird’s nest of a different species, like a warbler. Because its shell is disguised as a warbler egg, the cuckoo mother knows the baby cuckoo will be cared for, so she flies off and leaves the hard work of brooding to the other mother. Since the cuckoo eggshell looks nearly identical to the other bird’s eggs, the warbler mom doesn’t know when she sits on the unhatched cuckoo that it isn’t hers. Before its nest-mates hatch, the cuckoo pecks its way out and tosses its host’s babies overboard so that it is guaranteed enough nourishment to grow far bigger than the murdered babies ever would have grown. Nature is also heartless, dangerous and indifferent.
And yet, a Ukrainian refugee told me, “Nature is beautiful.” He told me this when I had returned to Stadecken-Elsheim five years after we had moved back to the U.S. A friend had introduced us and I had asked him for his impression of Germany. In a matter of months, he too had noticed this undeniable facet of German culture: nature is prioritised, revered and respected. Around this small town, a person can wander anywhere. Tractor paths in Germany are open to people who wander.
When my family and I returned to our German hometown, I needed to stroll past the garden allotments; I had missed peering at their simple beauty. Pushing a stroller on the path, an older woman passed me and stopped to let the small child observe the chicks, pecking at fruit remnants under a tree. In this place, time moves slowly enough to let a child look and allow an elder to add her wisdom.
A neighbouring allotment contained a lily-padded-pond, a rusty handpump, a tree swing, a tiny playhouse on stilts, a grape leaf arbour arched over open-padlocked fences, bees sucking nectar from tall wild fennel behind an old shed, fragile white butterflies feeding on untended lavender, cobwebbed burdock stalks looming, hollyhocks splashing pink along the border, chickens’ whirring a melody. No sound of cars interrupted this quiet beauty.
Stakes leaned in to form a teepee structure for green bean stalks, which towered over the lone sunflower and an abandoned birdhouse. A yellow sign with black letters announced a warning: Vorsicht Bienen (Beware of bees), and then I noticed four large bee hotels on raised square frames and drawers with grey plastic tops and bricks holding down the lids. Bees entered and exited as if on a mission of goodwill and clear purpose.
I crossed the stream on a tiny improvised bridge of a wooden pallet scrap and headed back down the garden path that led back towards our old house. Fat cylindrical hay bales dotted a small field on my way back. I remembered walking this path on the day that I gave birth to Lily, my youngest daughter.
*****
Winter offers mud and dead, wet leaves. Wind stirs our hair about and Lily stops to poke her chubby finger at the mud. Her doughy, dimpled hands bulge from her sleeve and latch onto a chain link fence – she notices the brittle clematis vines clattering as if suddenly aware of a new creature. Spring exposes a fat snail on the geraniums in the garden; we stop to admire the snail’s “noo-noos” – antennae that resemble noodles – peeking out and retreating into its café-au-lait-spiral-patterned shell.
Summer brings us beans in a tiny pot by the garage. Lily wants to return to her work of dirt and water, but I manage to direct her attention to a blackbird atop a shed roof. We move on to check out the sheep that are across the field, grazing near the trees that line this side of the stream. “Baa,” she calls them. Lily pauses to consider stepping in a puddle (it’s been raining all day). “Tractor,” she says, pointing at a trailer parked between the sheep pasture and the beginning of garden allotments. We move on, underneath our neighbour’s expansive cherry tree whose branches stretch over his back fence to create a canopied grassy path. The cherries within arm’s reach have all been picked. The rest, too high and out of reach, hang tantalisingly far over our heads. “Apple, apple, apple,” Lily says with barely a breath between each word, so intent, her brown eyes staring into mine and eyebrows raised. I explain, “Plants have babies, too small to pick. Let them grow. Baby apples still have to grow.” A German mother would correct her mistake and say, “cherries,” but I let it slide – she calls all tree fruit “apples.” We continue on and peer through another fence at a small veggie garden. I name for her, “cabbage, swiss chard, carrots, squash.” Lavender and roses greet us up close, then calendula flowers and an abundant sage bush. She points at the lavender. “Yes, you picked that for me the other day,” I tell her. “Hmm,” she replies in affirmation. Except for an occasional aeroplane flying overhead, we only hear our voices, birds, and the quiet settling in of nighttime.
*****
One day, I drove my girls to the Mainzer Sand, a small natural preserve in Mainz, an area that remains as it was before the last ice age – 8000-12000 years ago, before there were forests in middle Europe. The area, bounded by highways and housing developments, has sand dunes instead of soil – fine white sand and flora that otherwise only grows in the steppes of Asia. It is a sort of wormhole out of the developed, modern world and into a strange primordial natural landscape.
When we arrived, the girls’ grumbling about going to an odd location ceased when Addy stopped, pointed and exclaimed, “Mommy look at the pink one!” I looked out at the meadow of wildflowers and weeds, but I couldn’t see what she meant. A bit closer, and I saw the wildflower that stood out amid the rest—fuschia-coloured blossoms at the top of what looked to me like a grain of wheat or barley. And then, suddenly, she burst out again, “Blaulinge!” On both sides of our path, we saw tiny blue butterflies, the underside of their wings white with tiny black spots. On the top side of the tiny butterfly, deep blue along the body fading lighter to the outer edge of the white-tinged wing, a painter’s delight. The girls wanted me to take a photograph, but having no camera, I told them to look all the more closely to remember it enough to describe to their father and paint it from their mind’s eye. The butterfly was such a lovely creature that I had a child’s urge to capture it just so I could linger over its beauty.
Then, after we stopped to read about this place on a sign, we exchanged greetings with an elderly couple who explained that some birds nest right in the weeds and sands; they mentioned the American tanks that had roamed this ground before they were informed that this was a natural preserve.
We turned back intending to leave in search of a playground closer to home. Eliciting more griping, I insisted on taking another turn towards a sand pit. I ignored the girls and stopped to listen to a blackbird, chirping on the ground. “Why doesn’t she fly away?” we wondered. We continued on to an area of sand dunes with flour-fine white sand, an open space with no danger of birds nesting on the ground.
The girls peeled off their sweaty socks and luxuriated in the simple delight of this fine texture on their skin. They built cakes, buried their feet, ran barefoot around the perimeter of this natural sandbox—up, down the uneven but velvety terrain. They improvised a game of blind man’s bluff, leading each other purposely into pits and then up the mounds.
After a while, they devised a competition, each one with three lives to expire when one fell down in the sand. They were to run, eyes closed around amid the mounds and pits. Ceci lost twice but was not disappointed by defeat—she enjoyed falling in the sand. Her sister, Eva, fell and rose, laughing with a mouth and nostrils full of sand. Our ears detected only the faintest sound of cars speeding on the autobahn toward a public pool, a grocery store, a tennis court; our eyes beheld only this prehistoric, mysterious landscape.
Eva said, “Mommy I want to live here,” but I brushed off her comment, laughed and asked what she would do when darkness came, when she needed her bed or a toilet.
But, I thought to myself, I want to live here too – I want to play, warmed by the sun, soothed by fine sand; I want to revel in her mystery, in her simplicity. I want to live here too.
