There is this hill near our house. It has become sort of a destination for the members of our house. We started going there in the winter to sled ride. It isn’t actually that large or steep of a hill, but for a 4 and a 2-year-old, it works as a sled riding hill. The hill isn’t located very far from our house.
We live on a dead-end street, a street that once had thru-traffic to the adjoining parking lot, but it has never been that way since we have lived there. The hill is located just off the parking lot, at the corner of the lot, in an area that appears to belong to nobody. Perhaps the hill is the “greenspace” that I learned about in the Land Use class I took in college. We have also started to think of the land just right of “the hill” as a nature trail because there is a path that goes around a fence that fences off a ditch of sorts. It is wild and a somewhat overgrown, but right now it is interesting and fu to walk through neighboring nature trail.
So we go there a lot now because the 4 year old is very head strong and will just take off without telling me where he is going and now the 2 year old likes to run everywhere and he can’t tell me where he is going because he doesn’t really talk yet. The 4-year-old will even ask for it. I will ask him what he wants to do today, and he will say that he wants to hang out at “The Hill”.
This morning he asked me if I could pack snacks while he loaded up his Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood backpack. He put his plastic puppy phone and favorite doll in his backpack as well as a diaper and an entire pack of wipes for his brother (all his idea). We headed off the to the hill with the boy’s wagon, which the older one pulled and a toy lawn mower, which the younger one pushed.
The younger one usually gets upset these days when we walk across at the parking lot to “the hill”, as if the largeness of the parking lot makes him feel insignificant in the world. He stops in the parking lot and cries. Sometimes he wants me to pick him up, sometimes he just plops down in the spot he walked to and doesn’t want to get up. I understand that feeling; it is how I feel anytime anyone talks about space. But eventually we all make it across, not without some struggle though.
The boys seem happy at the edges of the parking lot, the part where the grass is. We don’t have the fun we used to have riding the wagon down the hill because the grass is now too high, but the grass is perfect for lounging on. We park the wagon and for a few minutes the boys have fun getting in and out and running around. Then we open the backpack and eat the makeshift trail mix that I packed. It is mostly chocolate chips, raisins, and Honey Nut Cheerios because we don’t have many nuts left in the cupboard.
I lay in the grass with the younger one sort of laying half one me and half in the grass. The older on sits in the wagon and we soak in the sun. It was a bit of chilly morning, but the sun makes it very pleasant. The grass feels soft beneath me. We are all lounge lizards, to borrow an expression from an old college friend.
It is a perfect moment that might not have existed had we not been living in quarantine times. I look at my watch realize that things were normal right now I would probably be rushing around right now, probably either finishing shopping or getting our walk in and getting ready to pick the older one up a school.
I like all this not rushing around. I used to feel like I had to make a trip the store if we didn’t have something for dinner, now I just make use of what we have even if we are out of some of the ingredients. It is also nice to operate with less of an agenda. Lots of mornings these days, I have no set plan when I wake up and many days no set plan when we finish breakfast either. We are kind of just going where the day takes us within a basic framework.
During our grass rest, I discovered that I am developing a new-found begrudging respect for “the hill” in particular and the parking lot in general.
When the older boy insists that what he wants to do is walk through the parking lot, to concrete stage-like area that is part of the still vacant, after one year, grocery store, it still kind of annoys me that this is what things have come to. I think, “Why aren’t we playing on a playground? Is it really better for us to hang out in this parking lot?” There is broken glass and some rusty nails connected to a board on “the stage”. But my children have come to think of this parking lot as an annex to our yard. It holds some kind of unexplainable appeal.
So this is what we are doing for now.
Back in the days when I taught environmental education, I remember reading a book called Sharing Nature With Children. We had sort of a book club meeting where we discussed it. One of the things that I remembered reading was the author said that in order to get people to care about the environment, you can’t just tell them stories about the rainforest and why we should care for it. Instead, you should encouraged children to build forts and have nature adventures near there house.
So I guess that is what we are doing. Instead having the older one practice writing his name and practice his cutting with scissors skills, I am teaching him to care about the hill near his backyard and care about parking lots and the shopping center that lives in it.
What have you been up to?
