Walking with my mother

My mother is -- or rather was -- a park naturalist. She's semi-retired, but still knows a great deal about the natural world and isn't afraid to share. It's a fairly consuming passion; she's heading to Ecuador in a week for a three-week trek through the jungle in search of rare birds. Faint of heart, she ain't.

When I was a child I was regularly dragged out for walks in teh Nature. I say "dragged" because I loathed them, and let's face it, I live now and have lived for close to ten years in a city environment -- not even suburbs -- and I love it. I am more than happy to spend all day every day in a built environment, and actually hyperventilate when driving in a place where no human habitation can be found. I will likely never be found trekking through the jungles of Ecuador. 

These hikes and walks through the nature, when I was a child, were more prolonged (and therefore, in my mind, more gruelling) than might otherwise have been because my mother could not walk more than ten steps without pausing to admire and point out something that was fascinating and interesting, to her and probably many other people, but which prompted in my impatient and wishing-for-my-book self merely eye-rolling and theatrical sighs. 

My sister was once heard to remark that you couldn't walk anywhere with my parents because if it was the daytime my mother needed to stop and look at the flowers, and if it was night my father needed to stop and watch the stars.

Yesterday my mother came to visit for the day and we took The Boy to the nearby park which has ducks in the pond and a beach and many other things. And I watched my mother take my child in hand and show him how to tell the boy ducks from the girl ducks, teach him the names of the different kinds of ducks, show him how soft the feathers are, and even point out the teeth marks on nearby trees from the resident beaver. We came home afterwards and she sat with him through two iterations of the book she bought for him on reptiles. 

And he loved it.

And so did I. 

In the years since I was eight years old I learned that even if I didn't enjoy my mother's nature walks, I sure did respect how much she knew. I stopped going hiking with her, but I still looked at her millions of photos of birds in flight -- often fuzzy -- that she brought back with her. I may not share her enthusiasm, but I am so pleased she has her own enthusiasms.

And yesterday, watching my son enraptured by her tales of beavers, ducks, and beach dwellers, I finally managed to enjoy a nature walk too.