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OK, no one likes to take the first dance so I'll start. I was about 8. We lived in New Caledonia and my family flew for the weekend to a small island called Ouvéa. We stayed in beach bungalows with roofs of woven coconut leaves. Well, just before dinner one night I was swimming in the lagoon and found a purple seashell buried in the sand. I couldn't believe how smooth it was, how shiny it looked in the setting sun. So withdrawn in my daydreaming I didn't see a wave coming and ... away floated the seashell. It quickly sank. I poked around in the sea until it was dark but never found it. It's my favorite nature memory as a child because all my senses were wide awake on that evening. The warm temperature of the sea, the rainbow colors of sunset, the lulling sound of crashing waves, the salty taste of the lagoon and the smell of the dinner's barbecue ashore. It was a full on sensory experience and I still remember it fondly. That purple seashell found a better home than my bookshelves.
Now, what's your favorite nature memory as a child? It may seem obvious but don't comment anonymously - I won't be able to contact you and announce the winner. Good luck to you all!
9 comments:
Nature memory would have to be of a beach in Malaysia called Desaru that we did a family vacation to. To this day I remember the beach and the fun we had!
I didn't have a lot of nature experiences at home in Kansas, but when I was 12 I went to a camp in Colorado for the first time. I remember my first hike up to a rocky overlook. It was a hard hike for me, I remember realizing that I could just keep walking, no matter what was going on in my head. I also remember the smell of the pine forest and how great my lunch tasted sitting on top of the those rocks looking out!
I grew up in western Sonoma County surrounded by nature, so I was very lucky. My best memory is spending hours on summer afternoons at the creek with my dad and my little sister. We had a great swimming hole and we would spend time making a little rock dam to make the water deeper. Once I was searching for rocks under a little cascade of water and I picked up a long skinny rock, but when I got it to the surface it turned out to be a very angry crawdad!
I remember hiking with my family in Sunol Regional Park when I was probably about 7 years old. It was winter and the trail was somewhat washed out and very muddy. My sister slipped and started sliding down the embankment. My mom went to grab her and also began sliding down. My dad reached for them and, yup, he too began sliding. There was no going back up so they slid slowly down the 15 feet or so to the bottom of the gully. I didn't want to be left on the trail by myself so I slid down too!Laughing and very muddy we walked down the gully till we met up with the trail again. And a few days after that I got my very first case of poison oak.
For a couple of Thanksgivings, my parents and a couple of other families would pack up a Thanksgiving picnic and we would spend the day at Vasquez Rocks (en route to Palmdale, CA, I think). These were the days of Walt Disney Presents (or something similar) on television on Sunday nights, and I was perfectly content, wandering all over the big rock formations there, pretending I was "Charlie the Lonesome Cougar."
~Outdoor Adventurer
One evening my son and I were walking through a nature park here in the Portland area. The sun had gone down, and we were getting close to being out while in the dark (the park limits trail use to sun up and sun down), so I was trying to hurry my son along, and we kept stalling to look at this mushroom and that mushroom on the side of the trail. At one point going around a curve in the trail, I heard a bunch of rustling in the trees and bushes on our left. When I looked over, I saw 3 deer emerging onto the trail. After a few seconds they crossed it, then proceeding to follow along the trail why in the trees to our right. It's not a huge nature park, but for the time of day - no one else was there save a runner or two - and the solitude that creeped, watching and following these deer for a little ways before they took off running was a little moment I'll always remember (and hopefully my son will remember).
My happiest childhood memories involve nature in some way or another. I grew up in the Italian countryside in an old farmhouse surrounded by the bounty of the outdoors: hay fields, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, woods, streams, verdant lawn (that my mother managed to somehow carve out of the fields of hay, my favorite weeping willow, an enormous raspberry patch, chickens & ducks, an amazing German shepard, wild rabbits and hares, and my neighbors who were farmers and salt of the earth. Perhaps my fondest memory is of my sister and I being allowed to go jump around in the stacks of fresh hay one fall evening in our nightgowns. I will be forever grateful to my mother and father for making the move from an apartment in Rome to that natural paradise. It was so much a part of the early childhood educator I am today!
Complete rich sense memory of standing on the beach (Long Beach on Long Island) watching the sunset the last time before we moved. I was 9 and I can feel what it was like to stand there watching the sky change and the seagulls fly and the first star appear. I loved the beach and missed it so much when we moved inland.
Sitting by a river with my dad and watching the wild life is my favorite memory.
Ann
cozyintexas[at]yahoo[dot]com
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