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Nature or Nurture or Wild
March will be happening really soon. It’s a promising month, March is. Of course, there is always potential for a bit of wintry weather during the month which used to “come in like a lion and go out like a lamb”. However, there is the promise of the first day of the new season in March. When I was a kid, the month March was the beginning of the muddy season. I think the kids in our neighbourhood looked forward to the possibility of losing one of their galoshes or wellingtons in a mud puddle. Do kids lose a boot or a shoe in a mud puddle these days? I imagine the potential for muddy roads and yards has greatly diminished since my days as a youngster. Our neighbourhood, Strathburn Park, was usually an ocean of mud by the time March hit the mid-way mark. Sometimes I imagined archaeologists of the distant future carefully digging into the ground only to unearth a partially decayed rubber boot then coming up with a story of how the ancient people of Toronto’s suburbs tromped across vast wastelands on their way to the Spring hunting grounds while following the migration of skunk, raccoon, mangy dogs and bunny herds. I sort of thought I’d be an archaeologist when I was a kid. A library picture book of the unearthing of the secrets of the Great Pyramids of Giza set me on that path, ever so briefly. In my early tens, or perhaps eights, I believed the only place any archaeologist ever set to work was in Egypt. I could hardly believe anything would be unearthed in our backyard. My younger brother and I may have dabbled in archaeology and were known to not only leave a boot or shoe in the mud but were given to burying broken toy bits and Matchbox cars for those future unearthers of history.
The moment the page of the Scarboro Foreign Mission calendar was flipped to “March” it was time for us to start bugging Mom about putting our brown, winter galoshes away and replace them with the black rubber wellingtons. Rubber boots were as much a must as they were a fashion statement. Like a lot of kids in the neighbourhood, the fashion forward choice was to roll the top of the boots down, thereby making a cuff of sorts. I went once step further and rather than fight with the stiff black rubber boot I managed to cut about five inches off the top of my wellies. No rolling down was necessary and the boots were, in my youthful estimation, “a hundred times easier to put on. A kid didn’t have a lot of time to get outside to the gloriously muddy roads and fields where adventures were calling. Not buttoning your jacket and having mud-boots you could easily jump into as you ran out to the land of soakers were time-savers. Mud pie making awaited. Now that March 2024 is just a few days away, I feel the same urge to get outside and stomp in a bit of muck. If you know me, and you don’t, you know I’d be stomping through the soggy yard to see how the “return to the wild of the back forty” project was going.
The wilding of our backyard began last spring. I marked-off a section of the yard and then lawn care stopped. Without much in the way of research, I figured nature didn’t need to be nurtured. I sowed a bag of wildflower seeds, relocated a few plants from other parts of the property and assumed I’d wake up to a scene from a Disney movie. I expected the back corner of our property to become a meadow of wild flowers overnight, or at least within ninety days. A person can dream. Apparently it is a dream to think nature is something a person can push or prod into place. The ungardening would take far more planning than just a conscious un-mowing. Hmmm. I wanted to create a space where birds and butterflies could hang out. I may have been having a moment when I made the decision to re-wild. We’ve been here close to forty years and for most of those years “wild” was the last thing I wanted. I wanted my yard to be tame and green. All of the little flower beds would be orderly and magazine-worthy. As it turned out, I’m not an orderly or tame kinda gal. I’m a mud puddle with cut-off black wellingtons kinda gal who looks forward to the slow, and beautiful process of wilding of my backyard.
By the way, I do have a pair of cut-off black wellingtons.
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