When You're a Daughter of the Woods
Tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, I'll venture into the wooded territory I know better than the back of my hand: the 200-some acre Ozarks farm where I grew up, complete with a creek, groves of cedars, horse fields, and towering oaks that approach the periphery of heaven.
But I'll not be alone: I've invited my daughter, niece and nephew (and any willing adults) to join me on the trek. We'll be amateur field biologists, armed with notebooks and pencils. We'll sketch images and take ecological notes. I'll be leading the pack, trying to pinpoint things that amaze and delight.
Had journalism not won my heart, I likely would have ended up a field biologist. I've never led a field biology trek before, so I'd be grateful for suggestions from readers. At the moment, I'm planning to create a list of 10 things we hope to find. Among the ecological wonders we’ll seek are: moss, an exposed root bed, a fossil, various bird species, scat, animal tracks, a sassafras root, and a deer tree trunk rubbing.
Keep in mind: my junior "field biologists" are ages 15, 6 and 3. And an eager "Auntie Sasha," an oncology nurse on holiday from San Francisco who makes every adventure infinitely more fun. So far, the teenager (my daughter) has responded to my proposition with the following humorous texts:
"No."
"Mom please no."
"Don't do this."
"With every ounce of my soul save me please"
"The nature hike >:("
"HELP ME"
"I don't ask for much of this world"
And yet, I know (or I like to believe) she's secretly intrigued.
A daughter's sacred connection to the land
When you grow up a daughter of the woods, as I did, you feel a sacred connection with the timeless, ethereal landscape that surrounds and envelops you, particularly when you are alone. Tonight, I went for a walk through the woods and fields and felt a magic I have never felt outside of nature. It has followed me to the Highlands of Scotland, the jungle rivers of Thailand and the remote desert nights of the Persian Gulf.
This evening on a walk, I marveled at the colors of the orange, fuchsia and golden sunset on the plains. I listened, for the first time, to the sound of the cows ripping up tall grasses and gnawing them with their strong jaws, and I smiled at how that nutrient led to the organic beef we have for dinner nearly every night here at the farm. I walked the mostly-dry creek bed where I swam as a child after heavy rains. I hiked out to the old, dilapidated treehouse Dad built for us deep in the forest, 20 feet aloft, complete with sliding windows and a tin roof.
When I was little, my father would take us in the old farm truck into the forest to chop wood for the fireplace. We learned the difference between the leaves of a sassafras and a post oak, between gooseberries and blackberries, cedar and pine, a red-tailed hawk and a buzzard.
Sometimes, Dad would identify a very young, green tree about 20 or 30 feet tall and pull the top of the tree down until it was horizontal to the earth. He'd have us kids latch on with gloves to the tree shaft, then let go--causing us to feel a next-to-zero gravity sensation as the tree sprang up, until our weight countered its natural strength and brought it back to Earth. On we went, up and down, enjoying a natural trampoline-like sensation. I'll probably try that with the kids tomorrow. I'm packing my pocketknife in case I need to trim a few twigs from the trunk.
When the ponds froze over (which they used to do much more frequently than they do now, due to a rise in global temperatures), it was my job to hike down to the pond and hack a two-by-two foot block in the ice with the ax so the livestock could stay hydrated. In the hottest summers, the four "Moore girls" would pile into the tractor's front bucket, and Dad would lower us into the heart of the prickly blackberry bushes to pick our hearts' full of berries. Mom would often bake a pie or a cobbler from our winnings. I learned to lasso a loose calf from horseback and start a fire from kindling and leaves. On the rare occasions a cow struggled through the birthing process, I assisted Dad in "pulling" the calf to meet its first breath.
My co-workers in the city find all this hard to imagine; they hear these anecdotes and call me the "high maintenance cowgirl," a term of endearment which I have adopted with pride.
I think, tomorrow, I'll take the kids down to the enormous, red barn that hugs ZZ Highway and let them peek inside. I'll share with them my amazement at the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years it took to make the fossils and the stunning strata of igneous rock formed at the earth's surface. I'll take them to the swimming hole in the creek bed we knew as "Frog Island," where the tadpoles still hatch and grow into generation after generation of amphibious neighbors.
We'll look for mushrooms and berries and lore and little friends.
And we'll do so with a sense of gratitude and wonder. Here's to wishing all of you, my friends, the beauty and awe to be found right around us, if only we are willing to seek it. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all from the rugged, Ozarks woods and meadows of the Howell Valley.