Spring 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SPRING 1999.]

Rediscovering Nature Through the Eyes of a Baby

By Emerson Howell Nagel

A year ago, when I was nine months pregnant, I was working for a big bank, commuting an hour a day, and generally racing around downtown Chicago. Forget having time to smell the roses — I barely made time to water my houseplants. A few frantic sorties on errand-crowded weekends to rip up weeds in our vegetable garden was about as close to nature as I got.

Then something happened.

I had a baby. Of course, there's nothing so unusual in that. But it was very unusual for me. First of all, I was used to being able to race around. Well, no racing around with a baby. It makes them fussy and irritable. Second, I was used to spending most of my awake time in a hermetically sealed office tower, only seeing nature from above. Way above. And there was no way a baby was going to fit into that grown-ups-only citadel, where the loudest noise is the copy machine and nature exists only as Rent-a-Plant. Babies screech and chortle, and as they grow, they run around and knock things over and pull out all the drawers. Not exactly office material.

But third, and most important, I stopped wanting all that rush-rush adrenaline-pumping stuff. As never before in my life, I wanted to sit still. Sit still and hold my baby, watching the world be discovered for the first time by his little blue eyes.

At first, I was happy just to carry him, snug in his little pouch, everywhere I went. But as the spring woke the earth up, that young child inside of me woke up again, too. For the first time in years, I noticed the leaves on trees. Nat and I would lie on our backs in the grass, looking up at the branches of the maple in our front yard and the tiny new buds shooting out. It was all new for Nat, so he mostly just grinned and giggled. But for me, it was new, too.

I'd show him the tiny bugs in the grass, and we'd smell the dirt together, watching robins pull out worms and squirrels chasing each other back and forth excitedly. He smiled, and poked at things, and rolled over. And I? I soaked up those rays of early spring sunshine, my heart bursting with joy at being connected to the earth again.

Soon we exhausted the flora and fauna in our front garden and started to venture further afield. We'd go to Caldwell Woods, a Cook County Forest Preserve along Devon Avenue, and find trilliums — like the one called, to my enduring delight, Stinking Benjamin. And we'd walk through thick carpets of may apples. And glimpse bright yellow marsh marigolds tucked in cool copses. Those spring flowers felt like a metaphor for my own self, re-awakening to the incredible fascination of the natural world, miles away from fax machines and computers and the Internet.

Then summer arrived. As a child, I squandered my summers. I took them for granted and got all excited at the prospect of going back to school in the fall so I could see my little friends. But when I grew up, after college, I had to step into the Real World and face the probability that I would never again have a summer off.

I panicked at the thought. Never again to walk in the woods or go to the beach or swim in a river. Except for weekends, of course, which to my eyes then looked like nothing more than temporary parole from jail. Time went on, though, and I numbed those feelings, as most of us must if we're to go on working in those well-paying jobs. Every now and then, on a fine spring day when I could glimpse Lake Michigan from a corner office window, or when I visited the Lincoln Park Conservatory, I remembered how I loved to be outside, close to the earth. But I ruthlessly squashed those feelings, and went less and less to the forest preserves and the lake.

Well, last summer I spent almost the entire time outside, in a sleeveless shirt and shorts, usually barefoot. With Nat shrieking with delight at the freezing cold lap of Lake Michigan's waves on his tiny toes. Or Nat dozing off as we lazed in among the catalpa trees in Evanston's Ladd Arboretum, fanning ourselves with their huge leaves and sniffing their beautiful orchid-like flowers.

We were outside as much as we could possibly be without putting up a tent. One of our favorite outings was to the Chicago Botanic Garden. We loved the waterfall there, and the Japanese gardens, but the part we both loved the best were the (six!) prairies. I could put Nat down (he was just starting to crawl), and we could go nose-to-nose with all those sights and sounds and smells.

Already a budding naturalist, Nat tugged at the huge Joe Pye weed and stared raptly at the fat bumblebee greedily extracting the nectar from the prairie sunflowers and coneflowers. We were really there. Nat and I sat in the prairie for hours, drinking in the smell of the warm big bluestem grass in the tallgrass prairie, listening to its gentle rustling in the cooling summer breeze.

Later we'd take a stroll around the lagoons, watching herons standing gracefully in the shallows, waiting to spear a fat carp with their beaks, or fish hawks swooping down, sometimes landing, sometimes swooping back up triumphantly with a bass or bluegill.

My mind just drifted along, like the monarchs and skip jacks alighting on butterfly weed. Instead of zooming and zipping, I floated and glided, my boy at my side, with his wide-open eyes.

Of course, leopards don't change their spots that quickly. I still can't live solely in the moment, the way Nat does, and I make all sorts of plans for the future. I want to take him canoeing in the North Shore Channel in Evanston, along the Ladd Arboretum, and watch for the kingfisher that I've heard lives there. I want to go exploring with him and show him Aphrodite fritillaries and lance-leaved violets. But mostly, I want him to come to love and enjoy nature as much as I do, and to learn to protect and cherish it. Who knows where the business of life may take him? But maybe one day, with my grandson or granddaughter, he'll be able to re-discover nature all over again himself!

Emerson Howell Nagel and her husband, Bob, had a garden store in Evanston — Emerson's Garden — which economics and a full-time day job forced her to close. She recently left the world of high finance to stay home full-time with her son, Nat.