Tl;dr (Too long, didn’t read)
This post is long-ish. It’s mostly a trip down memory lanes (intentionally plural). It’s a deep dive into nostalgia and not being able to go home again. It’s also a call-to-action for those of us with positive early nature connections to judiciously use our rose-colored nature glasses.
The upshot? We know frequent positive nature experiences and influential adult role models are the two biggest factors contributing to lifelong care for Mother Earth. We must make sure teachers are distributing rose-colored nature glasses to all students everywhere. They can do this through apple-a-day nature-based learning.
Sentimental because
I’m leaving my childhood home after a few weeks’ visit.
I’m feeling sentimental because. That’s not a typo. That’s just where that sentence needs to end.
Looking out on the bucolic landscape, listening to the birds, shivering slightly in the crisp early morning air – humidity at bay from a rainy night – I am thinking about my childhood. And about my now.
I’ve been traveling down memory lanes. Many, not one.
You can’t go home again
I paid a visit – with my daughters and my mom – to my childhood home.
When we arrived, an overweight, mid-to-late thirties bearded man with glasses, baseball cap, sloppy black t-shirt (not with the Flaming Lips logo, but that’s what I’m picturing now that I can’t remember what band name was on it) and sweat shorts – a textbook work-from-home computer guy – was loading a toddler car seat into his truck.
Was this the new owner?
Nervous-curious, I walked up the driveway holding my girls’ hands. My mom hung back.
“Hi,” I awkwardly said.
“Hello?” he answered, kindly.
“Sorry to be weird. I just wanted to stop by to see the house. I grew up here. My parents built this house.”
“Oh, wow.” He looked at the house. “You’re welcome to look around. I am just heading out to pick up my kid from T-ball.”
I waved my mom up the driveway and we introduced ourselves.
Isaac was friendly. He let the girls play on the elaborate play set in the yard where we used to rake the leaves into a pile and jump in them. I looked around. The crab apple tree next to the garage is taller. My mom’s beautiful flower garden (one that I spent hours weeding to build up my piggy bank funds) – is gone. The huge oaks and maples in the yard and driveway still stand – taller like the crab apple. The towering white pine is absent, having fallen through our living room during a tornado in 1980 when I was still in my mom’s womb – only narrowly missing my pregnant mom and brother who sat on the couch watching a movie only moments before, literally making their way down the stairs to the basement when she fell. The wild forest – and the poison ivy – are still thriving beyond the edge of the groomed grass, though there are more houses encroaching.
I overheard Isaac – apparently not in a huge rush – ask my mom some questions about the property and the house while I absently watched the girls play and traversed eighteen years of memories in this place.
As predicted, Isaac is a software developer from Austin who works from home. His wife is from a nearby town. What was our “sunroom” is his office. Our old home has been “a great home for his family” – his wife, him, and their three kids including twin toddlers. They’ve been there just a year.
He got into his truck to leave.
“You can stay and look around more,” he said. “I just need to run. If you go inside, the dogs are friendly but one is kind of a handful.”
Polite Midwesterners, we didn’t want to overstay our welcome, so we snapped a quick photo of me with the girls on the front step and headed on our way.
As we got back into our car and drove past our neighbor’s house, I desperately wanted to get back out. There was somewhere I wanted to show the girls.
For more than a decade, sola or with my brother or neighbor kids, I cut from our yard through the Leavitt’s backyard, down the steep hill, past the beehive, to Lowes Creek where I’d spend hours wading enroute “to the Mississippi” (which is theoretically possible, if a bit ambitious given Lowes Creek flows into the Chippewa River and then onto the Mississippi over more than sixty miles). We found crayfish and river rocks and snail shells. Painted turtles slipped off logs and frogs jumped from the mucky eddies. I once found a softshell turtle that I really wanted to keep but knew better and let it go. One day, I remember getting pushed downstream by a highwater current into a tree that had fallen across the creek – a “strainer” in boating terms. As the water swept my feet out from under me and carried my legs below the trunk, I beach-whaled my belly onto and over the tree to escape. I was a good swimmer, and that was really scary. The water was way more powerful than I was.
My brother was with me. I didn’t tell him what happened.
Sometimes when I went to Lowes Creek I didn’t get in the water. I stared at the birch leaves waving in the breeze. I gathered leaves and looked at wildflowers. I ventured down on snowshoes crunch-crunch-crunching through crusty Wisconsin shady forest snow. When I wanted to be a writer (!), I even brought a journal there in early attempts to document nature and place.
As we drove away, I asked my mom who lives in the Leavitt’s house now, briefly entertaining the idea of taking the girls down to the creek.
“No idea,” she said, and we drove to lunch.
Nostalgia
A few days before, while on a run through the streets of Sturgeon Bay and the Potawatami State Park forest, I listened to
podcast episode called Are Millennials the Most Nostalgic Generation? I’ve added this pod into my rotation because it touches on random and entertaining cultural topics that are a getaway from my usual heavy, subject-matter pods and doesn’t demand quite the same level of attention (Thanks Gabby of for that rec!).I’m technically an “elder millennial” having arrived in this life in 1981 – the cusp of a new era. Overall, I identify more with Generation X, but when it comes to nostalgia if we are indeed the most nostalgic generation, I’ll fly my Millennial flag. I’m in it.
Surely this resonance is partially because I’m in my childhood hometown where I made many of my adolescent memories.
Over the course of about 40 minutes (played at 1.5 speed, of course), host
and her guest, , answer the question about Millennials’ extreme nostalgia as follows: every generation is nostalgic; Millennials are nostalgic now. Maybe it’s because we’re no longer at the vanguard of culture making. Or, because many Millennials now have kids who are teenagers ‘excavating our memories’ (Anne’s words) as they themselves enter such an intense memory making phase (not me though – my kids are 4 and 6 – I was a “geriatric mom”)(Who the hell came up with that term?!).And this: nostalgia blossoms when things around us are hard and we want to think back to what feels (in retrospect) like a safer, easier time. It’s a way we cope (or not!) with massive shifts that have taken place within our time on this planet. In today’s rancorous political context, rapidly changing social paradigm, and warming globe, we are tempted to conjure ‘the good old days.’
We Millennials formed tons of memories BC – before cellphones. This is especially true for elder Millennials like yours truly who didn’t get a cell phone until I was in graduate school and waited until 2017 (not even kidding) to get a smartphone (though my husband still laments the era when I called him “Siri” and asked navigational questions on my dumbphone as I drove around, dictating street names to him and growing impatient with the crawling speed of second-hand GPSing. Sorry E!). Even if you got a smartphone before I did (likely), a simpler time feels tantalizingly close for us.
We retroactively rewrite history, evoking rose-colored simplicity (‘When I wanted to hang out with friends, we met up in-real-life after agreeing in advance where and when we’d meet and we actually SHOWED UP on timeish). We also cherry pick our suffering to sound tougher (walking to the bus stop in a blinding snowstorm, uphill both ways). The hill in question is always steep, however dubious a claim that is in northwestern Wisconsin, where gentle rolling is what hills do.
What’s more, for anyone who grew up insulated by privilege, as I did, our suffering is not a very deep well to begin with, so hills become cliffs and we sometimes even ‘walked barefoot through snow and ice’ in ever more hyperbolic fish tales we recite again and again.
Nostalgia, especially privileged nostalgia, has its dark sides. Rose-colored glasses are memory’s color blindness – and other blindnesses – where sometimes we wax nostalgic about the “good ol’ days,” treading on, or at least perilously close to, erasure of things that weren’t great for many memory-forming adolescents back in our day.
And, nostalgia is dangerous because we can’t go home again anyways. We would be trespassing rather than traipsing through what was the Leavitt’s backyard.
Kids these days
So what of nostalgia and its relevance for apple-a-day nature-based learning in schools everywhere? Truth is, I’m having some trouble explaining this to myself, and now to you too. Sorry to drag you into it, but I know it’s important.
Some of you have seen this oft-cited stat:
If not this fact, you have likely heard people (including yours truly) waxing nostalgic for our days of roaming around in the woods, unfettered, for hours at a time, with no adult supervision, navigating our own social dynamics with other kids or with more-than-human nature playmates – or both – and learning and growing out in the fresh air. The good stuff. And, in the same breath, we lament that ‘kids these days’ have fallen into Aldo Leopold’s ‘two spiritual dangers of not owning a farm’ (by which he means being disconnected from more-than-human nature): “supposing breakfast comes from the grocery, and…that heat comes from the furnace." These are serious and prevalent dangers for sure.
And, I believe kids these days have become prey to a much graver and more pernicious spiritual danger associated with being disconnected from nature: crippling ecoanxiety.
And it’s our fault.
We cite various boogey-agents:
“We didn’t have screens,” we say.
We didn’t carry computers in our pockets.
We didn’t have 24-7 responsibilities in an unregulated social media hinterland with potentially viral-scale consequences hanging over us.
We didn’t contend with AI.
But we did grapple with artificial flavors and red dye #3. And PCBs and CFCs and leaded gasoline. And the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. The uncontrolled AIDS epidemic. The War on Drugs. Massive racial tensions and economic inequality. And a gazillion other problems.
I’m not saying there’s not a lot of bad shit happening the world right now. There is.
More?
Maybe.
That’s a quantitative exercise with which I have little interest in engaging.
So I want to recognize that “back then” it wasn’t all rose-colored and that now is hard too. And, I believe if we’re careful we can leverage our rose-colored memories in service of a better now. And a better next.
Specifically, for those of us lucky enough to have rose-colored nature nostalgia – which is most of us who grew into adults who care about more-than-human nature – let’s not let ecoanxiety and climate catastrophes and environmental doom be the only memory making that is happening for children and adolescents.
Let’s recognize that the two major factors that lead to kids who grow into adults who act with care for Mother Earth are frequent positive experiences of nature and influential adult role models1 – including parents, mentors, and – you guessed it – teachers.
Let’s make sure ALL kids get a pair of rose-colored nature glasses before they learn about the sobering realities of the day. Let’s provide opportunities for them to form joyful core memories in, of, by, and with more-than-human nature.
We can do this by having 81 million teachers – influential, trusted adults – curate frequent positive nature experiences for 1.5 billion students on our planet with apple-a-day nature-based learning in schools everywhere.
❤️ B
Some of the research documenting these two factors are compiled in the January 2024 issue of Children & Nature Network’s Research Digest.
Becca!💕🌸💗Wow! Thank you for inviting readers to travel alongside your nostalgia. It was a beautiful trip and I was happy to wear my rose-colored glasses. I am still smiling and letting soft tears slide down my cheeks as I took in every detail from the new dad at the car to the tree catching you in the current. I love the way you write. You have this way of leaving a reader feeling like, “Oh, I know what she means.” Or “Yes! Say it again for more to hear.” Inspired, Jodi