A Natural Urge
From the time I was a child I can recall being pulled toward and fascinated by green space and trees. Parks, to a city child who knew, for the most part, sidewalks and stunted city trees. I can recall several visits to city parks with my parents when I was very young. One would sit on a blanket and contemplate the scene around one, sans sidewalks, sans buildings. In the shade, if one was an adult, in the sun, sans blanket, if one was a child.I loved the ambiance. It was so soft, gentle, bright. The cityscape in comparison was bleak, hard, unwelcoming, alienating. I wanted always to be among the trees, in the grass, in the sunlight. The colours of a park fascinated me, comforted me. As a child I was unable to access parks without my parents and they were obviously not driven to take me to such venues, despite my continually asking them to.
I can recall, a little older, being in a park with a friend. At a fairly tender age, city children became relatively independent back then, more than a half-century ago. People seemed then not to be as conscious of the potential for disaster befalling children unattended. Likely it's not that such a potential was seldom realized; more likely that news of mishaps were less likely to be publicized. The friend with whom I was with, although I recall nothing whatever about her, alluded to the fact that old men often attempt to lure little girls. This information intrigued and also frightened me. I was curious. And sure enough, there was an occurrence; an old man tentatively approached us and began to behave in a most curious manner. My friend giggled, I laughed nervously and we both ran.
My mother's older sister, married to a Polish peasant, a very pleasant man who worked as a tailor for Tip-Top Tailors (she was a seamstress there as well) lived with him in a three-story house on Indian Drive, near High Park, a huge city park which, once I was introduced to it, became for me the creme de la creme of parks, and I would do almost anything to be permitted to go there. And I did, occasionally, with my parents. Eventually I was permitted to take the Queen Street streetcar and travel on it on my own, to visit with my aunt and uncle. Actually I wanted to visit with their two children, a boy one year senior to me and a girl two years older. My aunt and uncle would pick wild mushrooms in High Park, take them back to their house and set about frying them, the house quickly picking up the heady fragrance of the cooking mushrooms. Once, on such a mushroom-picking expedition with my uncle, he told me he would give me a purse (I had never had a purse) if I let him 'do something'. I made the connection between my long-ago encounter in a park and my kind old uncle, and I never did get the purse. But it wasn't the last time I had such an offer from him, and it wasn't the first time I encountered an odd proposition from him.
When my husband and I met we were both fourteen years old. He had an uncle and aunt who owned a farm near Bolton, and in the summers he used to spend some time on the farm, with his three cousins, working on the farm. I thought how much more worldly he was than me, as he'd had so many more valuable experiences than I had. We used to walk in various city parks together, and even go further, along to High Park. Such memories. When we were first married, at 18, we had a young Brindle Boxer and we took it with us to High Park, so it too could enjoy the pleasures to be had away from cement and concrete.
Now, after fifty years of marriage, we have incredible memories of the many green spaces we've seen and been, however briefly, a part of. There is a need we share, and which many people also do, to be within the confines of nature for however brief a period. It is as though we live in a kind of constant and perhaps required banishment from our original home, and we suffer pangs of regret for its loss, and a deep-seated need to return to it as often as we can. Not to return, however briefly, is to disregard a kind of spiritual need, a need to replenish the kind of resources which nourish our souls.
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, June 25, 2005
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