Let’s be clear: I don’t have kids. That said, we hope to be parents at some point and I hate to think of my hypothetical-yet-future children growing up without a good ol’ dose of Mother Nature in their lives.
What am I talking about?
Nature Valley {yes, the granola bar company} recently released a promo that’s been circling the internet. It popped up on my radar this morning and it damn near made me cringe. In fact, I think my face weirdly contorted a few times while watching it.
Heart wrenching….because it’s true.
When I was a kid back in the early 80s, the outdoors were literally our playground. My mom would kick us out on Saturday mornings and my sis and I would grab our Huffy bikes and ride a block over to our friends’ house. From there, our two-wheeled pack of hooligans viewed the world as our oyster. So many options!
Sometimes, we would ride down to the nearby elementary school and play at the park. It had a huge field with a fence, so it was a great place to kick a ball around. Or, when we were feeling the urge for the woods, we’d ride up to the top of our street where a small drainage stream existed. It was no more than three feet deep but the surplus of water lent itself to a veritable woodland. We built a fort among the trees and hung our purple-and-pink canteen on a branch. Had to stay hydrated!
When we were feeling entrepreneurial, our gang ‘o girls would walk to the city park and scour the gutters and sidewalks for aluminum cans. Our parents told us that we were allowed to keep any money that came from recycled cans. Score! Once we gathered a grocery bag full of aluminum, we’d ride over to the can bank located in the parking lot of Target. We’d laugh at the machine’s strange noises as it gurgled and crunched our cans, eventually belching as it spit back our money. We never made more than a few dollars, but it always made us happy.
Occasionally, my parents would let us turn the garden hose on the front flower beds, creating a bit of a muddy mess. Happy as pigs in slop, we would sit down in the mud and “create.” Vases, bowls, teacups–it didn’t matter. We’d studiously mold the mud, intently focused on the details of our project. Once our creations were formed, we’d carefully line them up on the driveway where my dad wouldn’t hit them with the car. After a day of basking in the sunshine, we’d gather up our pottery and deliver it to our favorite neighbors. I vividly remember a mud vase sitting in a neighbor’s front window until the day we moved away.
The best days were when mom and dad would come outside to play with us. Since we lived on a corner, our front yard wrapped around. This made our house the default kickball yard! We all wanted dad on our team because he could clearly kick the farthest. I remember watching in awe as the yellow ball sailed over our heads and across the street. There was another time when dad wailed on a softball, knocking up a huge popfly. We all watched in horrified glee as the softball lofted into the air….and then crashed down on the windshield of my parents’ car. Whoops!
Mom didn’t play kickball but she always took my sister and I outside to work in the gardens. Sometimes we would help her weed; other times we would merely complain. I loved it when her tomato plants got those fat, green caterpillars. She would show us how to remove them from the leaves of the plant and then squish them or drop them into soapy water. More often than not, my sis and I would squeal as we squished the big Hornworms between our fingers.
My point is this: not a single one of my favorite childhood memories stems from computers or phones or television or even movies. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy those things, because we did. But it was a rarity rather than the norm. Saturday evenings were spent as a family watching Walker: Texas Ranger and Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. It was the one night of the week were the TV regularly turned on, and it was a big event. But it definitely wasn’t the only event.
Technology is the wave of the future, and I don’t doubt that. But I would hate for future generations to forget what it’s like to experience the outdoors rather than see it through a glass screen.
There’s just something lost in translation, you know?
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