Oak Grove

The creek is our favorite spot in the woods. But the creek is a mile walk from our house. On days when there isn’t time to get down there we have another spot. A grove of huge, old oak trees that serves as our closer to home hangout for exploring, playing, and relaxing.

It is quiet and still in here among the trees. Quiet enough that when a pine cone falls, clattering down through pine boughs, there’s a distinctive soft crunch when it lands on the leaves and needles of the forest floor.

It’s never silent in the forest, but it is almost always still and quiet. Sitting here it’s hard to believe there is anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else feels too distant to be real. All that seems real is this log, the stillness of this winter afternoon, and the birds singing as they flutter from tree to tree.

A few trees away, a nuthatch calls. Then there’s a chickadee dee dee dee. And another. Farther off a crow cries, closely followed by the shrieking of a red-tailed hawk. In front of me an ant picks its way through the layered humus.

The soft crunch of leaves muted by matted pine needles tells me Elliott is trying to sneak up behind me again. It is impossible to walk silently though, there are too many curled dried leaves waiting to announce your footsteps.

These oaks once shaded something. Perhaps a small barn. A shed for tractors perhaps. There are the remains of a few small buildings, some rusted farm equipment, and my favorite kind of country trailer — the bed of a pickup rigged up with a chain harness.

There’s a good bit of rusty barbed wire lying around too. After warning the kids to watch out for the barbed wire, naturally I was the one to finally end up cutting myself on it. I was trying to trace it through the undergrowth — my guess is this was some kind of paddock area at one point, hogs would have loved it back here — when my foot found a piece just barely beneath the surface. It gave me a chance to explain tetanus.

We leave education largely up to the kids. Corrinne is a literacy specialist, so she taught them to read. But mostly we let them follow their curiosity, rather than trying to force them to “study” something.

When they want to learn something we help them with any materials or tools they might need, but mostly we let them explore the world on their own, at their own pace. They like to load up their backpacks with notebooks and magnifying glasses and plant presses and other tools and bring them out here to see what they can discover.

Just as often though they just run around playing in the woods. Like kids do. Like kids used to anyway. Now more than ever we feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to be able to get outside and enjoy the world.