On getting what you want

At least once a week during this beautiful autumn, I had to cajole my children to go outside. The sun was shining on fall leaves, a mild wind blew, and the fields around us lay like blankets of flaxen colored corn and green alfalfa. In spite of this, my son wanted to sit on the family room floor and put together Legos, and my daughter wanted to sit on the couch and read.

“Go outside!” I told them, and they dragged their feet as if they didn't see the point of it. "The world has things to say to you,” I urged. "You need to go out there and hear those things now, because it is harder to hear the world when you are grown up. You have to learn the language of the outdoors while you are a kid.” They finally yielded, my daughter carrying her book out to her climbing tree.

Then, last week, the weather turned suddenly. The wind got raw and so strong that it blew over a small tree in our shelter belt. It rained, and then the sky brooded purple as it prepared to snow. The cold edged its way into my bones, and I sprinted whenever I was outside so I could warm up again as fast as possible.

During that afternoon, we went over to visit our friends. As I was wrapping up my hour-long chat with Molly, the mother of that family, all of our children all got dressed in warm gear and inexplicably went outside to romp and wrestle in the wet grass. We watched them through the window with wonder. We finally got dressed and went outside, too. Molly was going to feed her calves, and I was going to round up my children and take them home.

The children had other plans. They had been waiting for us to come out of the house so we could march with them through the corn fields, looking for ears of corn that had fallen down on the ground when the combine passed. On one level, this seemed absolutely ludicrous to me. On another level, it seemed like exactly what I have been hoping for, so I tied my hood around my head and followed the whole crowd out to the fields. The wind was so strong that I staggered a couple of times. A piece of rigid pink insulation as large as a twin mattress went cartwheeling over the gentle slope before us, blown by the gale. I was grateful that I had worn my big rubber farm boots because frigid water stood on the ground between the wretched rows of shorn corn stalks. I shivered so violently that my right arm seemed to take on a life of its own. Finally, the ridiculousness of it all gave me the giggles.

In the meantime, the children pranced along as though they were fawns on a lovely spring day. When they found a little cache of grain on the ground, they would cry out with glee, “I am rich in corn! I am rich in corn!” Sometimes there were tears if their riches were not distributed equitably, but then they took off in another direction and found a new treasure trove with enough to satisfy everyone. After what seemed to me like an eternity, everyone had enough corn, so we turned towards home. Now the ears of useless field corn sit on our counter as mementos, but they will soon join the compost.

It was a miserable experience, but now the colors of the brooding sky and wet corn stalks will be part of my heart and the hearts of my children. The buffeting wind will remain with us as an experience of unbridled power. I believe that while they were looking for corn, my children were learning to hear the language of wildness. I find myself wishing in vain that one could learn that language while staying warm and dry.