Nature Walks

There is something I love to do, and I call it a Nature Walk. It is most especially fun if you can involve a kid, but I even enjoy them alone. My earliest memory of these is from daycare! I must have been about four years old, and we used to leave the classroom and take looooong walks out around the edge of the woods, down by the little retaining pond. Our daycare was at a highschool, and the Future Farmers club even had little buildings where they raised pigs. I recall every detail of my first encounter with a tiny wiggling pink piglet.

On these walks we would go slowly and observe our world. I think it may be when I first fell in love with fall leaves. When the leaves changed colors and began blanketing the green grass, it looked like a magic fairy land to me. I still have an inner urging to follow wooded paths when I come across them, just to see what I might discover.

Yesterday, I took my daughter and a friend on a nature walk. I gave them each a bag and let them collect things that caught their fancy along the way. When we got back they each had a pile of new treasures . . . tiny pinecones on a stick, golden maple leaves, a shiny rock with a green bottom from sitting in the water too long, and handfuls of purple weeds we found growing that look amazingly like tiny orchids. If the weather holds, I think we'll try another one soon and see what else we find!