Recently we have been spending a lot of time visiting my family in Louisiana. This has been wonderful for Sofia; it has given her the opportunity to experience things she never has before. Some of them have been as simple as horses and big farm dogs that she can pet and feed. Other experiences were things I never thought about until I noticed them happening.
For instance, we live in a nice subdivision in town, and most of our time is spent in either Clinton or Jackson. While Sofia does get to play in the yard and at parks, until a couple of months ago she’d never seen a true vista: a wide, long uninterrupted view of her surroundings.
Standing outside my aunt and uncle’s house and watching her gasp as she turned around and around staring at pastures and undeveloped lots made me realize something: she had just realized that the world was Big. There was simply so much more to see she didn’t know where to look. Things that looked small surprised her by being big once she got close to them. And she actually got tired of walking before getting where she wanted to go.
Everywhere we go at home our view is cut off by trees and buildings and fences. The world is chopped up and, from Sofia’s perspective, small. She can usually walk to anything she sees.
This got me thinking about how different her life will be from mine. My daughter will be a city girl, or at least a “town girl,” while I was raised a country girl. The rhythms and punctuation of Sofia’s life will not be made up of the same events and objects that my childhood was.
We always knew it was winter when mom started making oatmeal for breakfast and put our chairs around the front of the warm, open stove in the kitchen. Spring was when I could sit on the porch in the morning mist and watch the deer cross our yard from one patch of woods to the other. Summer was marked by sleeping with the windows open with only the oldest, most worn out sheets on the bed – because it was too hot for anything more even in the middle of the night. Lightning bugs were everywhere; they were stars you could catch and keep in a jar. Autumn was full of days at PawPaw and MawMaw’s house shucking corn, snapping beans, digging potatoes, and having the best fish fry at sunset.
These experiences shaped my year and gave definition to lengths of time too long for a child to understand. Sofia’s year is an uninterrupted string of air conditioned days and nights. She does not notice when her dad flips the switch on the thermostat.
I was never much of a unicorn-and-fairy-princess girl either. We had real animals that were just as mysterious and fanciful. We spotted a family of bears after a portion of the woods was cleared – we pretended they were talking bears that could show us magical places in the forest. An actual rabbit warren was in the field behind the house – a rabbit hole of our very own, just like Alice in Wonderland’s. A family of field mice living in the bush in the corner of the yard looked just like the ones in our Beatrix Potter books. Coyotes and wildcats that howled and screamed in the night. Armadillos, possums, “wild” turtles, dragonflies, egg-stealing raccoons, chickens, a pet turkey, hawks, cows, and foxes. Animals from storybooks and fables that fired our imagination all the more because we saw them doing what they really do.
It makes me sad that none of this will be part of Sofia’s childhood. When we spot a fox it will be unusual and surprising, a quick glimpse as we drive down a quiet road. She will learn about bears and raccoons on TV and at the zoo. But perhaps it will be good too. I never savored these times until I moved to Jackson for college and they became a part of my past. Sofia will grow up celebrating and treasuring the rare moments when her life and the wild world cross paths.
