Tag Archives: nature

Readers Share Nature Memories

by Woody

Sharing some smiles from my email inbox…

“Your column ‘Mining gold in front yard’s wildness’ rang a bell with me,” wrote Cyndi Nichols. “I have always enjoyed nature. I’m a gardener now, but when I was a child I collected bugs, their eggs and offspring. When there was a science fair in school, I brought the bugs and their eggs and the food that they would eat to share. I did not harm them.

“One year, I collected about 200 caterpillar’s eggs from our elm tree. I put them in shoeboxes and fed them elm leaves every day. One day I forgot to put the lids back on and had to scramble to catch them all and put them back in the boxes. Eventually, they spun their cocoons and emerged as butterflies. I took all the boxes into the backyard and let them out at the same time. What a sight!

“When I was about three, we lived in the desert, in Lancaster. My brother says I walked in with a tarantula in my small hand to show everyone. All my shocked mother could say was, ‘Take that thing outside,’ which I did. To this day I do not kill spiders in the house. Little jumpers and daddy longlegs I catch barehanded, but as I have gotten older larger spiders get caught in tissue and put out.

“I still love nature, from the tiniest flowers in the lawn, to the largest Dahlias. I love to garden and would like to have one of everything. I feel the same about animals of all kinds, whether it be pets, lizards, bugs. Thank you for bringing me down memory lane.”

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Linda Calderon also took a mental trip back to her youth: “My Dad used to walk my late brother and me to the end of our street and teach us which constellations were which. I sure don’t recall today, but it was great for him to do that.

“He also taught us to lay on our backs in the yard and imagine what different things the clouds looked like. I still find myself taking photos of some that look like poodles, etc., and I told my grandkids to go outside at their house and do the same. At 80, I’m still amazed at rainbows and photograph them also.

“I grew up in a small village (about 400 population) in the countryside and I am still in love with nature.”

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            In response to my comment that the Channel Islands are underrated, John Snyder replied: “Shhhh! I sailed to the islands, all of them except San Clemente and San Nicolas, at various times between 1972 and 2015.

“Most of our vacations, and practically all long weekends, were to/around Santa Cruz Island. Other than stinkpots becoming more prevalent over the years, little changed. This included the proposal by the family owing the eastern portion of the island to turn it into a resort area with hotel and fast food restaurants, which, fortunately, was shot down.

“That the island has been preserved is one of the happier memories of my life. As far as I’m concerned, the Channel Islands can remain concealed from human view, much like Brigadoon. Not like Brigadoon necessarily, but more, out-of-sight; out-of-mind, only those who have taken the time and made the effort to get there, knowing its delights.”

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Barbara Murray shared this closing wisdom: “It is hard in this current time to remember the beautiful things. I have one addiction: I think laughing is underrated. It heals the body and the soul.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Mining Gold In Yard’s Wildness

by Woody

In fifth grade, in springtime, in the afternoon, Mr. Hawkins, one of my all-time favorite teachers, grounded me from recess and instead gave me an assignment as a small punishment for talking in class.

While my classmates raced onto the playground, I was sent outside to the school’s front yard and told to fill a sheet of notebook paper with observations. I returned in about five minutes, bored and with an empty page, begging to go join my friends in kickball.

“Don’t come back until the page is filled,” Mr. Hawkins reprimanded, adding encouragingly as I remember it like yesterday: “Look up in the sky, look at the trees, get down on your hands and knees and really look.”

It may not be memory’s sweet exaggeration to report that I filled up two full pages, even three, with my findings. Certainly, long before reading these words by John Muir I learned their meaning that day: “There are treasures hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.”

Hidden, too, in a schoolyard’s grass, bushes and trees.

This all came flying back to my mind, like a red robin alighting on a dogwood branch, the other day when I spent some time really looking at the drought-resistant wildness of my front yard.

This close examination was further tied to Mr. Hawkins, who doubled as the school’s science teacher. Whenever a spider intruded in our classroom he would capture it beneath an upturned coffee cup, slide a piece of paper below, and then release it outside. He explained that while spiders may seem scary, they benefit our ecosystem by eating insects and pests.

Ever since, except in the middle of the night when I choose the heel of a shoe instead of a cup, I try to catch-and-release spiders as I would a lovely rainbow trout.

This time, when I bent down to liberate the eight-legged guy – or gal – in the front-yard landscape, I sighted a beetle crawling on a decorative boulder. I proceeded to watch it seemingly defy gravity by climbing down the steep face like a rock climber rappelling Half Dome.

Next, my eyes followed the paroled spider as it slowly scaled the long arm of a cactus plant. By now, I was back in the fifth grade, literally back on my hands and knees, filling up a lined notebook page in my mind.

A single file of ants marched across a dry creek bed of smooth stones; a butterfly, black and orange but not a Monarch, flitted by; a bird chirped out of sight and leaves overhead fluttered like nature’s gentle wind chimes; a second butterfly joined the first and they did an aerial ballroom dance together; another bird, a crow I believe, made a short commuter flight from our rooftop to the top of a plum tree.

For a long while I observed a lone worker bee go from flower to flower to flower like a trick-or-treater from door to door. In the midst of this viewing, a stray cat, black as midnight with golden eyes that seemed neon-lit, strolled up beside me as if to ask: “Hey, buddy, have you seen any mice in there anywhere?”

To this I would have thankfully answered “no” for I am too phobic of rodents to rescue and relocate one with a coffee mug.

And so it went, for fifteen minutes or maybe it was 45, I do not know. I do know this, as Mr. Muir also wrote: “In every walk with Nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” Mr. Hawkins would have surely agreed.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Part 2: Twain and Muir’s Meeting

by Woody

Part 2: Twain and Muir’s Meeting

Except for a story believed to be apocryphal, Mark Twain and John Muir, separated by only three years in age, never met. The two famous writers did, however, cross paths astrologically on April 21 – Muir born on the date in 1838 and Twain dying on it in 1910.

Following is Part 2 of how I imagine their conversation, using their own written words, might have gone had they shared a campfire in Yosemite.

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Muir: “A slight sprinkle of rain – large drops far apart, falling with hearty pat and plash on leaves and stones and into the mouths of the flowers.”

Twain: “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

Muir, laughing: “Wash your spirit clean. Keep close to Nature’s heart – and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”

Twain: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Muir: “As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail.”

Twain: “Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.”

Muir: “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away.”

Twain: “If all the fools in this world should die, lordly God how lonely I should be.”

Muir: “Most people are on the world, not in it. In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

Twain: “There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.”

Muir: “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Twain: “Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk. It is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear.”

Muir: “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”

Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Muir: “Going to the mountains is going home.”

Twain: “There is nothing more satisfying than that sense of being completely ‘at home’ in your own skin.”

Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.”

Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Muir: “The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

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   Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …