by Delilah
Mom wasn’t a good student and had no formal education past high school. Neither did either of her parents, and no one in our immediate family really valued or encouraged academia. But Wilma Dean was a lifelong learner. She was naturally curious about her surroundings and the natural world. Next to her passion and zeal for having adventures, she was passionate about learning. She would investigate every creepy, crawly, furry creature she encountered with the encyclopedia set in our hallway, or at the library, and figure out what exactly the living thing was. She loved to learn of our native flora and fauna; she studied trees and bees and edible, medicinal, and house plants. She loved antiquity, architecture, all things made of wood and anything shiny. She instilled in all four of her children a passion to learn about the world we live in.
When a cloud would pass overhead, she would study it and ask, “Now, why is that cloud so fluffy when the other clouds are so flat?” or “Now, why do you think the water is so much darker today than when we were here at the ocean yesterday?” And then she would try to figure it out.
“Now, why is that?” was a favorite Wilma expression, next to “dammit.” If I complained about something or talked about a social injustice or something I felt was wrong, she would tilt her head to the side, take a drag off her cigarette, and look me in the eye and say, “Now, why is that?” A rhetorical comment that was more of a challenge than a question. Her three living children ask that question constantly. Now why is it that grocery stores throw away perfectly good food while kids go to bed hungry?
Mom had books about statues of Chinese warriors; books about Tutankhamen, the child pharaoh; books on healing herbs and women’s medical issues; books on everything from how marbles were made to antelopes and aardvarks. And she stored the most amazing pieces of worthless information in her head only to randomly declare over dinner, “Did you know that King Tut was probably an ugly child with funny legs?” or “I hear the smelt are running tonight—do you kids want to go smelt dipping after the dishes are done?”
Smelt dipping. Crabbing off the docks. Berry picking. Apple stealing. Sledding in the snow at midnight. Skinny-dipping under the falls. Sliding down a sand dune on a board, or racing across the dunes in a buggy. Deer hunting. Snipe hunting. Treasure hunting. Bargain hunting. Dancing all night long with red lipstick, ratted hair, Aqua Net, and bell-bottom pantsuits. Mom slept little, lived off burned toast, cigarettes, and black coffee, and taught us how to live life fully. She died at fifty-seven but lived more in those years than many who live to be a hundred.
The smell of roses, honeysuckle, wild mint, and salt air all transport me to my paternal grandparents’ house by the bay. The hours we spent digging clams, finding tiny crabs hiding beneath barnacle-encrusted rocks, collecting seashells, and building sand castles are engrained in my memory like etchings on granite. I can’t remember important things, like what time a wedding is set to start or where I parked my car, but ridiculous details that mean nothing, mean everything.
I remember the scents of life most of all. The heady scent of lilacs in bloom take me back to my parents’ rented farmhouse up Lillian Slough, and picking them to make a bouquet for my mom. I smell hay as it’s being cut so it can dry in the sun, and I’m a farm girl again watching my older brother, Matt, throw the heavy bales up on the wagon to get stored in the barn for winter.
From these memories and images, I’ve tried to fashion a life for my children. If given the choice between a fabulous trip for myself and my husband to a four-star hotel on a sunny beach in the Caribbean or a week at our shore cottage on the chilly coast of Washington State with a dozen kids and a few wet dogs tracking in sand, I take the kids hands down. For me there’s no pleasure in luxury unless it is shared with as many as possible.
I try to overshadow the bad memories, the fights I witnessed with my parents and grandparents, the cruelty of men in my family to the women that loved them, and I hold fast to the small details, aromas, sounds and songs that brought me joy. Then I try to recreate those memories, and I infuse them with as much love as I can muster and give them to my children and the multitude of other kids I have been blessed to love.
I loved sitting around the bonfire when we went camping, listening to my dad and our friends play the guitar and sing silly songs deep into the starry night. I love the smell of campfire smoke in my hair, because that is the smell of family time. On my farm, we have three or four fire pits for campfires. We have one on the patio in the backyard right off the kitchen. It’s a rock fireplace that I designed for one reason: because I wanted one like my grandparents had, made of native stone in their backyard. The best memories I have of my grandparents come from sitting around that fire, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and listening to my grandpa tell ridiculous stories. He was missing both of his little fingers and told us kids one was lost from picking his nose and the other got run over by a steamboat…
So I tell my kids silly stories and we play guessing games around the campfire. Shaylah is a young adult now, but when she was in high school, it wasn’t unusual for her to say to me while I was getting ready to wrap up the night and close up the house, “Mom, is it okay if a few friends come over for a bonfire?”
“Define few,” I’d reply, already knowing the answer.
Within minutes (because, well, social media) the cars would come down the long gravel drive, the dogs would start barking, and within half an hour her entire high school choir would be assembled around the campfire up on the hill. Sometimes I’d join them to deliver sodas and s’more fixings, sometimes I’d climb the stairs to our prayer tower and open the windows and listen. It didn’t usually take long before they would break into song and start harmonizing around the roaring fire. I have tucked those memories in my heart right next to the ones of my dad singing around the campfire when I was a kid growing up in Oregon.
Shay has graduated from high school now and moved on with her life. Her younger brothers and sisters are the ones having bonfires beneath the canopy of evergreens, and their group of friends don’t spontaneously break into Broadway tunes or seventeenth-century carols as Shay’s did, but their conversations are just as enlightening and their time under the stars just as enriching for them.
It’s not difficult to create opportunities for memories, but it requires being 100 percent present. You have to turn off the TV, get off the damn computer, and be fully focused on the present in order to have the experiences that will be woven into the tapestry of your family history.
Sadly, most of us are too busy or too distracted to see the opportunities to create memories. It’s easy to get caught up in being successful, working out, being active in clubs and organizations, going to church, etc.—not that these things are bad, but often they become so time-consuming and our schedules so full, there is little room for spontaneity and creativity. By being too focused or busy, you miss the opportunities to just be silly, excited, daring, and fun!
I have a dear friend who was once a workaholic, and it was killing him when we first met. Okay, maybe not killing him, but certainly taking a toll on his family. His kids saw him on weekends, and even then he was often working on his computer or taking business calls. We were to take a business trip one time and I insisted we drive. Why, he wanted to know, when we could get there in half an hour if we flew. It would take hours to drive.
I tried to explain the beauty of the terrain we would be going through, mountains and valleys and huge forests that are hundreds of years of old-growth timber. “We can get out and hike! The rocks and trails are breathtaking, and I’ll show you a swimming hole my mom once took me to so us girls could go skinny-dipping.” His reply has become a running joke between us: “Anything I need to see, I can see from the front window.”
The truth is anything and everything you need to see can’t be seen from a car window, or from a picturesque photograph someone posted on social media, for that matter. Old-growth timber that reaches to the heavens, wildflowers in a field, kids singing around a campfire, swimming holes
in placid rivers, crawdads in shallow streams, city lights at night, the buzz of people watching and tossing Frisbees on a sunny day in a city park, a plush little couch in a corner coffee shop hosting an intimate conversation… These things can’t be seen from a car. They need to be experienced with all your senses. And when you smell them, touch them, hear them, feel the moment, drink in their majesty, the memories will be etched on your heart as in granite.
Digital media is both a blessing and a curse. I believe we need to stay vigilant. A babysitter who allowed our children to witness violence or played games that involved stealing cars, shooting people, or destroying communities would never be tolerated, but many kids spend hours and hours with these babysitters we call computer games. I’m sure you’ve heard of couples who have hit dead ends in their relationships and marriages that have suffered and failed because social media became their partner’s lover. Instead of romantic nights snuggling and talking in bed, the TV flickers blue light into the darkness and all conversation is lost in favor of canned laugh tracks and late-night talk show hosts.
I can’t tell you how many hundreds of women have called my show over the years, feeling completely abandoned and alone because their husbands came home from work, sat in front of the TV for hours, stumbled off to bed after falling asleep in the easy chair, and never connected with them on an emotional level. Statistics show that young children spend about as much time watching TV and playing on electronic devices as they spend in school. When do they have time to ride their bikes? Play hide-and-seek? Read books? Climb trees? Pull pranks? Build forts? Do chores? Learn to live life? Stay vigilant. Please.
When my grandfather was a young boy, school lasted through eighth grade, and then children were expected work on their family farm. Grandpa Mac (McGowne) knew how to do a man’s work by the time he was twelve, how to drive a team of horses, saddle them, and take care of their hooves. He could chop wood, build a fire, cook for a family, and do the dishes. He knew how to survive in a difficult world, and he and my grandma passed that wisdom on to my mother, who in turn passed it on to her four kids. I’ve tried to pass what I know on to my children, but it is so difficult in today’s world where working with your hands and your wits seems more a lifestyle choice than a necessity.
We live in a world that glamorizes greed and sloth, where the Kardashians are admired and emulated because of physical beauty and material possessions. In order to change the world, you have to be able to navigate the world, contribute to the world, get involved with your world, and you can’t do that when you are numb to reality because you are engaged in hours and hours of media each day. Stay vigilant.
When I started working in Ghana, in 2004, one of the first things that shocked me was seeing young children, only eight or nine years old, running out into busy intersections, selling things from cartons held on top of their heads. In the villages where I work and visit, I see toddlers helping their moms, sweeping the hard-packed dirt with a broom fashioned from twigs tied tightly together. My daughter Blessing was almost three years old when I met her. Her tiny body was tight like steel, and her little arms and legs were muscled like an athlete’s. She was used to walking for miles, carrying a bucket of water on her head. In Africa, children are taught from birth that they are a part of a family, part of a village, part of a tribe, and they are expected to contribute and help—like in my grandparents’ day, survival depends upon it.
Here in the US, children are crippled by adults doing everything for them. Kids who help with chores in the home often get a reward or an allowance, instead of being taught that is their contribution to the well-being of their family. Not that we shouldn’t teach our kids the value of money and help them to work to earn some on their own, but I believe simple chores like washing the dishes or vacuuming the floor should be a part of their daily routine; it’s what comes from being a part of something bigger than oneself.
Kids are crippled emotionally when they are protected from negative experiences and personal challenges, from the bumps and bruises of life, by claiming unfairness for a lower grade than expected or less playing time than wanted on a team, by parents stepping in when an altercation arises between peers. Under these well-intentioned parental assists, they don’t have the ability to learn personal accountability and responsibility in a way that allows them to bravely navigate the world and think of others’ needs and feelings as well as their own.
Our modern world poses a real conundrum to parents raising children. In a world of overabundance, overmechanization, overexposure to media, how does one raise ambitious, self-sufficient, caring, compassionate kids?
I strongly believe we are hurting our kids by not allowing them to get dirty, not allowing them to climb trees and ride bikes. We all need to be exposed to nature; even if you live in a jumbled jungle of a city, you need to find opportunities to walk under the broad expanse of an open sky, watch squirrels looking for nuts in a city park, feed pigeons as they land close enough to touch.
I see a lot of ads on billboards, the Internet, and in magazines touting the latest drug, device, or insurance program for our health needs. It’s simply a bandage over a bigger problem. Going outside, walking in the rain, planting flowers and edibles, eating the vegetables and fresh fruit, that is health care. I want my kids to get dirty, to roll in the mud and play in the streams. I want them to slip and stumble and to get scraped knees, because I want them to experience the beauty God has created all around us. A person can’t get engaged in saving natural resources, in fighting for the lives of sea mammals and endangered species, in worrying about the changing climate of our planet or the pollution in our drinking water if they have no connection to the natural world except through TV programming.
I got a call from Sonny (now going by Isaiah) one day as he was on his way home from a fourteen-hour shift as a police officer. When I asked him if he was going home to sleep, he said, “No, I’m making breakfast for the kids and taking them to church and then on a bear hunt.” We both laughed; he doesn’t really hunt bear, nor would he take his four kids—all under the age of nine—on a bear hunt. But when he was a toddler, we lived next to a big park in West Seattle and I would take him on long hikes through the majestic Douglas fir and madrone, the huckleberry bushes and salal, and along our trek we would “hunt” for bear. I taught him to search high and low for signs of tracks, scat, and spots beneath bushes or trees where they might curl up in slumber. There were no bear in the park and I knew that, but at four years old, he was excited to search for wildlife, to watch the squirrels running and playing, the crows flying overhead. We’d stuff our pockets with birdseed and sprinkle it along the trail for the wild birds to enjoy, and on more than one occasion we put marshmallows on tree limbs and left them for the “bear” to discover. Today he and his family live in a beautiful community next to a green space, and his kids excitedly go on long hikes, searching for the bear they might discover living in the woods.
Wilma Dean had it right. Wake the kids on a Saturday morning and surprise them with an adventure to somewhere that isn’t a virtual reality. It’s hard to replicate those days of old before the Internet and technology came blazing through and took over our social agendas. There is a big place for the Internet and social media and virtual connections—I love connecting with my friends and family and fans on Facebook, I do. But I love, love, love the moments off-line when I’m making real interpersonal connections, when my kids are having real-life conversations around a fire pit, when memories are being made, and the scent of a moment is being registered in my brain, when a moment in time is encapsulated by a song forever. In a world where we’ve become desensitized with too much information, it’s so important to get off-line and make real connections with people in order to feel again. The information will always be out there in cyberspace when we need it, but genuine feelings can only occur in real life.
If we are going to change the world, one heart at a time, we must make sure we and those closest to us are fully engaged and aware of
the beauty of the natural world, fully engaged in real life, real connections, real human and nature interactive experiences. We should be more excited about reality than reality shows. Trust me, I’ve been on enough TV production sets that I can assure you there is nothing real about reality shows.
What if you took it upon yourself to spend time with a young person, instilling in them something to care about? Horseback riding, swimming, drawing, skateboarding, foreign language, singing, cycling, hiking, reading, carpentry, welding, knitting, cooking, chess, card games? What is your hobby and how did you come to it? Have you passed it down to the next generation? Have you been open-minded about letting your child try a new hobby or skill, even if it’s not something that suits you? Believe in a young person, and you will change the world for that person. Teach a young person that talking is better than texting and that reality is better than virtual reality—and indeed you will be doing that child and this world a great service.
