Once, there was a little pond, and on that little pond was a small flotilla of tiny leaf boats. This was my doing, of course. Eight-year-old me had quite the imagination. Frog catching and worm inspection were also prime time entertainment. During the summer, my dad and I would spend hours in the garden catching the baby tree frogs and bulging toads, naming some but terrorizing many! At the base of the trees by the flowerbeds, in the tangled roots protruding from the earth, my friends and I would create sprawling fairy villages. Each house would have all the necessary amenities (acorn cups, moss pillows, and tiny leaf blankets) to attract the intended occupants.
Unfortunately, my childhood wasn’t all play. Most weekends we would do one of two things: clean the house or clean the yard. Our pond especially was always a long, tedious process. The ferns grew tall and sagged over into the water, prehistoric looking plants popped up everywhere in the adjacent gravel, branches and leaves fell into the creeks that fed and drained the pond, and the ivy grew in a frenzy, all of which needed to be pulled out and cut back to restore order. In short, cleaning the pond was kind of an all-day thing. Being the youngest, I didn’t have to get in the kayak to pull out the brambles and ferns and algae; my jobs were limited to the land. This included putting all the piles of pond gunk that were brought to shore in buckets, as well as weeding the paths. Yet no matter how often we worked in the yard, the wild always crept back in. It often felt like a futile endeavor.
As tedious as it was, having an overactive imagination came in handy here; it fostered a spoon-full-of-sugar-makes-the-medicine-go-down mentality. One day when my family had been outside cleaning up the pond, I was—as usual—clearing the gravel paths. I began finding uniquely patterned pebbles, and collecting as many as would fit in my hands. I started to collect the colorful flora that was within my reach and seemed marvelous to my young eyes, but I now suspect these things of beauty were the very weeds I was supposed to be pulling…. Soon, I was collecting pinecones, bright, red, round seed pods, variegated leaves, anything of interest, really, amassing for myself nature’s curiosities into a substantially larger pile than the one devoted to the weeds. Following the trail of one curious object to another, I found myself at the water’s edge. There I found the holy grail of entertainment for a tiny tot: mud! Upon closer inspection, the very same gunk I was supposed to throw away seemed truly terrific. Scooping up a few handfuls of this sludgy goodness, I brought it back to my little collection. The brown goop soon flattened out, and I found that it provided a nice, unifying display for all my treasures.
As I continued my quest for beautiful, praiseworthy, and of good report things in my own front yard, I discovered still more flowers, expanding to buttercups and forget-me-nots. Armed with my creativity and miscellaneous vegetation for ingredients, I was someone new: a baker! World renowned. Specializing in decorative pies. Solving the world’s waste problem by repurposing what would otherwise have been thrown out. Instead, making mud into something beautiful.
That moment in the mud was (and is) the magic of nature. Outside, everything is fascinating fodder for the imagination. The function of everything in the natural world is not restrained to one specific purpose as objects in the man-made world often are. Even people are restricted to certain roles in our world, but in the domain of mother nature, we are home, and we are limitless. Outdoor play was how I discovered this truth. Each time I put a leaf boat on the water, each time I constructed a fairy cottage, each time I made a mud pie, I was a sailor, an architect, a baker. This was very formative play for me, and that is the reason I want to protect this marvelous world. The reason I want to find pragmatic ways of repurposing gunk. The reason I know I can be an environmental engineer. I know how to invent; I have been ever since I can remember. Now, I know why I need to invent: to protect this kind of play of for my posterity. I want my kids to still be able to set sail their own tiny leaf boats in a wild wonderful world.
