Grateful for Nature

  Grateful for Nature

I love to post sunsets on Facebook.  I guess you would call that “my thing”.  I’ve posted literally thousands over the years of living here on the Coast.  The other thing I love to post are flowers, lots and lots of flowers.    The other day I got this comment on my post: “Thank you for sharing all the beauty that I didn’t pay attention to when I was growing up there.”  The person who wrote that was born and raised in a house just north of where we live and now lives in Southern Oregon.  It got me thinking if I observed flowers and sunsets when I was a child? 

I have a lot of childhood memories and images, but none of them involved sunsets.  I do have some images of trees and plants.  One image is of an apricot tree in our yard when I was around five years old.  What I remember about the tree is my parents canning the apricots and all the messy slime on the ground from the rotted fruit that had fallen. 

Another memory is of a shrub with little white clumps of flowers that smelled good and attracted bees.  I went to the shrub with a glass jar to see how many bees I could capture in the jar; the jar lid was full of nail holes so the bees would stay alive.  I caught many and never got strung.   I remember that once the jar was full, I would take the lid off and run fast, setting them all free.   I think the object of all this was more the dare of not getting strung. 

Then there is the weed or bush that has small yellow tulip shaped flowers.   You would pluck the yellow portion from the green stem holder and suck a very slight bit of nectar from the inside before tossing the flower away.  Some were sweet and others were not.  I did this with friends as sort of a competition to see who was most successful in finding those that were sweet though there was no way to prove that one flower was actually sweet or not, as only you tasted it.

Then there were the pomegranate trees throughout the neighborhood. Seems they were wild, but probably not.  They were in empty fields and hanging over fences in people’s yards.  As far as I know, neither my parents, nor my friend’s parents used pomegranates like they are used today.  But we kids in the neighborhood did love them.  We would crack them open and eat the seeds.  What a mess but so much fun.  One of my friends came up with freezing the seeds so for several years I would collect and freeze seeds and they became a favorite snack. 

There is only one plant however that I loved, and remember, because it was beautiful, the Bougainvillea.  We had one in our backyard, and it was in all its splendor when I had my sixth birthday party.  It is the backdrop for the many photographs, rather slides, my dad took that afternoon and evening of friends and family.   The sixth birthday was my largest childhood birthday party and evokes lots of positive memories and images.  Perhaps that is why I still love the Bougainvillea so. 

I would have to say that my interactions with nature were pretty much my friend who commented on Facebook.  I was not that directly aware of the beauty around me but it likely did have a positive effect on my later love of nature.