I’m reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, a collection of short pieces describing life around The Shack, the country cottage he and his family inhabited for many years. The descriptions follows the months of the year and I’m reading one each day, treating myself to Leopold’s vivid insights into the flora, fauna, and humanity of the place. Leopold’s prose should be part of every writing class as he captures the whole experience. Here, March geese, who seem to know there aren’t hunters in the spring, “wind the oxbows of the river, cutting low over the now gunless points and islands, and gabbling to each sandbar as to a long-lost friend. They weave low over the marshes and meadows, greeting each newly melted puddle and pool. Finally, after a few pro-forma circlings of our marsh, they set wing and glide silently to the pond, black landing-gear lowered and rumps white against the far hill. Once touching water, our newly arrived guests set up a honking and splashing that shakes the last thought of winter out of the brittle cattails.”
After I finished my blog post about gardening as a 21st century skill, I picked up Leopold to read the entry for March. The whole piece is about the arrival of the geese in Wisconsin in early Spring. His comment about being involved in the natural world seemed a perfect punctuation to my own thoughts on this Spring morning.
A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for the geese. I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
It’s quite interesting to read your comments about gardening. I grew up on a farm, where we produced almost all of our food. As I became an adult and moved away from the family farm, I also moved away from this process of growing plants for food and raising animals for food. I live on 4 acres in a rural area, but cannot find the time to do any gardening beyond tending to my flowers. I have the skills, whether you consider them 21st century or 18th century skills, but my 21st century life is an impediment to utilizing them!
Grocery stores have allowed us to take growing food off the priority list so we can focus on other pursuits and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But, I don’t want to lose the knowledge, skills and dispositions that go along with producing your own food. I worked for a principal who lamented that no one knew how to slaughter a chicken and he worried about the days when some global catastrophe meant that we all had to keep our own chickens for eggs and food. I’m more interested in the dispositions…that learning how to grow things provides a connection to the environment that kids don’t always get in school and it’s often one big puzzle that you solve sometimes by reading, sometimes by trial and error, and sometimes through folk wisdom. For instance, St. Patrick’s Day is considered the right day to plant potatoes so at some point I’ll be out in the garden today with a spade in my hand, putting pieces of spud in the ground!