April 2023

INHALING….  Deep full breath..  In your nose.. Hold it..  Did it get you?  If you haven’t been outside in awhile I need to remind everyone that spring has finally come.  I love spring.. wait, I love a warm spring.  I’m not a “chilly” spring kind of person.  In all actuality I’m not a “cold weather” person at all.  Don’t get me wrong. I love snow and the cozy feeling of watching the snow falling and mound up on the trees. I said watching.  Clearly just watching.  

I have always been an outdoorsy kind of person.  I easily get cabin fever and a simple step out of the door can clear my head of all of it’s woe’s. Being indoors for too long makes me so crazy that I could literally focus solely on the fingerprint I saw on the cabinet door yesterday.  Okay. Okay not that bad –  but I do long for the outdoors every day.  I’ve talked a great deal about being different from my family while I was growing up.  One of those things was that I was one kid who could be outside 24/7.  Don’t get me wrong… I did stay in Sunday mornings and watch cartoons.  I mean I wasn’t a maniac for Pete’s sake.  The majority of my days growing up were filled with horses and anything that involved being outside.

If I close my eyes and think back to being a kid,  I literally think about our local park, walking to the supermarket, riding horses and swimming in a friends quarry pond.  I have to remind everyone that I am of that age where the kids were basically locked outside all summer.  I joke saying that but there was a bit of truth to it.  When people talk about being afraid of the Gen-X generation there is the scary truth to the way most of us were raised.  We were literally raised like feral wolves in the great outdoors (Boy this is whole post in itself).   Turning the lights on meant the sun came up.  Both of my parents worked full time jobs and in the summer it was an outdoors free for all. 

Depending on which age range I was in I have great memories of being on the move and busy.  When I was on the younger side, our local parks and recreations department held an arts and crafts time.  It was basically a free summer camp type of situation.  There were a few college age kids that set up in the shelter house and we did things ranging from plaster of paris to wood carving.  It lasted a few hours several days a week and afterword’s it was on to playing in the park.  We had an amazing park where I grew up.  Thinking about it brings back such amazing memories.  Climbing mulberry trees, playing on the equipment and making paths in the woods.  We had the kind of play equipment that made us tough.  We had a huge barrel on rollers.  It was a monstrous whiskey barrel on its side with both ends open resting on rollers.  You would use all of your might to make it roll like a big old hamster wheel.  It was big enough that four kids could stand inside it next to each other.  We would use all of our might to make it roll as fast as we could.  Once we had it rolling so fast we couldn’t run any faster we would lay down and try to make ourselves fling all the way around.  Think of the splinters we pulled out of each other.

When I finally hit the double digits I could walk to the stables by myself.  I had gotten a pony for Christmas the summer before and all my days from that point forward were focused on horses.  It’s not even just the horses that flood me with memories but everything associated with them.  The stables, where I kept my horses were a few miles walk.  It was located on several hundred acres.  It was miles of dirt trails through the woods, a small lake with an island and many corn fields.  It was a horseback riding business that rented horses out by the hour for people to ride on the trails.  I paid my rent by helping with the horses and “patrolling” the trails.  I laugh at myself typing the word patrolling because I was as young as ten and as old as 16 while I had my horses there.  I’m not sure how much patrolling I was doing as opposed to just farting around.

Later as I got older and had children I wanted to encourage the love of the outdoors with them.  I have three unbelievable kids.  We’ve taken them fishing, river tubing, camping and horseback riding.  The oldest went rock climbing, cleaned horse stalls with me and even walked creeks as her dad and I went fly fishing.  I think of all that time outdoors with her so fondly.  So picture this in your minds…   Summon the idea of a beautiful fog surrounding mother and daughter holding hands with beautiful flowers and trees surrounding us as we enjoy the wonders of nature…..WAKE UP. Now after living this dream filled life, she hates the outside.  I raised a kid that literally hates the outdoors.  I failed to pass on the “great outdoors” gene. [ I lay on the ground dramatically throwing the back of my hand to my forehead asking myself how was this even possible…How on earth did “I”, said lover of the outdoors throw a mutant indoors gene?].   In her defense she isn’t the only one of my kids that finds more things to do inside versus outside.  I blame the internet for it not my genes.  My outdoor genes are Viking true!

I’ve talked a lot that my love in life is being outside.  Even today a simple visit to my hammock can cheer up the shittiest of days.  So much of what has happened to me medically (which also affects me emotionally) has not taken that love out of me.  I do have to admit I have had to learn to love the outdoors in a different way.  The challenges that I have faced with my health have created that need but I refuse to let it take that outdoor spirit from me.    I do what I can to foster it in my life as it is now.  I don’t get to ride a horse up a trail and listen to the sounds of it’s hooves crunching in the snow, but I do get to watch the birds from a bench or a short path and determine what species it is.  I may not be able to sit by the campfire that I built but I can sit next to one someone built for me.  I can’t put up my own tent but I can sit here typing this post from the comforts of a camper with electric recliners, wifi and air conditioning all awhile: I keep the camper door open, take deep full breaths of the spring air and feel grateful that I’ve been blessed with the ability to continue to enjoy it.