Outside, exploring nature. That means I’m turning over rocks and finding bugs and slime-coated things found only under rocks. I’d often find ants carrying tiny white eggs. I wasn’t the type to destroy such things and I always put the rock back, gently, where it was. Even better were pools of water. There was one at the school I went to from kindergarten through third grade. It was adjacent to a small wetlands and shallow, and only about five yards long and two yards wide, but when you really looked you’d find minnows, tadpoles, and frogs.
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| To organisms, trees are villages, cities, or nations. |
In summer, tidal pools in rock formations at New England beaches teemed with life. Little fish, periwinkles, hermit crabs, starfish, mussels, crabs, all hiding, draped in seaweed.
My natural world took on greater dimensions with gifts of a microscope and a pair of binoculars. I still have the binoculars and the Petersens Field Guide to Birds, and I wish I still had the microscope. I also got a telescope. It was fairly powerful but not great for star gazing because the eyepiece was straight and the trees in anyplace I’ve lived made it only possible to see things far above the horizon. I had to sit low and crane my neck to look at anything. It gave me some good sights nonetheless, especially of the moon. I was nearsighted and didn’t get glasses until fifth grade, so seeing the moon through a telescope was the first time I could really appreciate its shape as a three-dimensional sphere, a big thing that had mountains that cast shadows. I also saw a binary star.
My telescope wasn’t powerful enough to make out Saturn’s rings. Those I saw in college in the quad of Old Kenyon, when a student two years ahead of me had set his telescope up and was inviting people to look through it. My own had no tracking capabilities and it surprised me how fast the moon would pass out of its field of vision. With his, you could stare at Saturn for long minutes, and be awed by it.
