News-Press storyteller Amy Bennett Williams and her son Nash recently took a hiking trip through the trails at C.R.E.W. Marsh relishing in nature’s tell-tale signs of Spring here in Southwest Florida. The outdoor sights and sounds, though, also got her thinking about all the characteristics of nature that defined her own childhood and lamenting what some no longer considered worth knowing in a modern day childhood experience.
Aside from the dismal error that is daylight saving time, I can’t remember anticipating a springtime more eagerly in years.
For weeks, I’d been trying to shake off a winter veined with the worst sorts of darkness, and when I saw the inky lubber nymphs boiling up over the blue-eyed grass, it started to fall away.
Had I been in the garden, I’d have felt altogether different about this rising tide of baby grasshoppers, but Nash and I were hiking the CREW Marsh trails, so they were perfectly in context.
Still glossy and petite, the tiny critters looked nothing like the honking monsters they’ll eventually become. We watched the crickety swarm flow over the blue stars until shrill cries distracted us.
Circling the upper fringe of slash pines, the first swallow-tailed kite I’d seen all year coasted overhead on a warm breeze, a whip-tailed something squiggling in its talons.
In addition to the black-and-white migrant, that breeze carried the marshmallow perfume of the just-blooming asiminas mingled with pennyroyal and sun-warmed pine.
I know I say this about all the seasons here, but, really, this one is the best. No, we don’t have snowmelt and crocuses, but orange blossoms and chuck-wills-widows’ twilight songs are more than enough for me.
We walked deeper into the ferny shade. Live oaks, branches frothing with pollen-bearing catkins, lined our path. When he thought I wasn’t looking, Nash snapped a handful off and tossed them in my hair, crumbly oak caterpillars I shook out with a smile.
Catkins. According to the Oxford University Press, these tree flowers, which have been part of Nash’s growing-up, no longer merit inclusion in their children’s dictionary.
Never mind their mom-teasing potential (and the yellow war paint provided by slash pine catkins) they just don’t rate, the editors decided.
Earlier this month, Robert Macfarlane noted in The Guardian that the latest edition had excised a number of words “it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood” in favor of a new set that included included blog, broadband, bullet-point, chatroom, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.
Among the deletions: acorn, buttercup, catkin, dandelion, fern, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.
Now, I have nothing against the additions, but it pains me to think that words like acorn and pasture —words that have defined my own child’s childhood — are no longer deemed worth knowing.
But I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that we’re raising a slightly anachronistic kid.
As at-home as he is in the world of iPhones and Xboxes, Nash is equally at ease in our springtime woods and wetlands, scrambling through willows, watching herons and gathering pockets full of acorns.
And if that’s irrelevant, please don’t tell him — at least, not until he’s done growing up.