You Must Not Wait for Clear Skies to Dance

Lessons Gleaned from Walking with My Daughter in the Rain

It has rained nearly every day this May. A cold, gray drip that settles in and stays. The clouds have been slow-moving, the skies dull, the air heavy with waiting for the spring we increasingly fear we will not see. The bees we started at the beginning of the month are restless in their hives, investigating their entrances when they hear our voices, eager to fly. The chickens linger longer in the coop, quieter than usual, their laying slowed by the chill, by the dark. Inside, we light the woodstove to drive the damp out of the walls while the urge to do nothing pulls us toward inertia. It is hard to remember that we are creatures meant for the good green earth.

Harder still to act like it.

My daughter asked to go for a walk in the High Wood this week and I said yes, not because I felt especially adventurous, but because if we use the weather as an excuse to not do something, we will never do anything at all. So we pulled on our boots and set out along the upper path we call the New Loop. The Old Loop I hiked when I was younger is slightly longer but it forces you to walk through a hay field and, with the surge of ticks in the recent years, it’s better to stick to the forest paths that do not have tall grass. The New Loop is a fine hike though; it winds up past the soft white pines into the hard maples, past the ancient sugaring arch, and skirts the long hill where the fiddleheads and chanterelles are always abundant. The air was damp, the loam full, the forest awake. It is something else to walk through your own woods when the rain is still clinging to the branches. Everything looks greener, darker, more alive. The moss drinks. You can nearly hear the leaves growing, their anticipation to unfurl in sunlight palpable. Our dour adult minds tell us its a place that will wet your socks and drive the damp into your bones. A child however walks through it with laughter and reminds us of deep green magic we have allowed ourselves to forget.

We hadn’t been long on the trail when she saw the fallen tree. It had come down years and years ago, one of the big ones, a maple with a trunk as thick as a car. It lay in the forest off the trail like a ramp, its roots clawed into the sky, its crown tangled in the understory. She looked at it like a knight might look at a dragon. “Can I climb it?” she asked. I hesitated. It had rained, after all. It looked slick, sapped, rain-black with moisture. I gave the kind of permission adults often give when they want to say no but feel too sheepish to do it. “You can climb it if it’s not slippery.” She didn’t nod. She didn’t say okay. She just walked over and touched the bark, tested it with her hands, put one foot on a lower limb. “It’s not slippery!” she called back. Then she climbed. Not quickly or carelessly, but with the attention and confidence that children have when they know what they’re doing. She climbed to the top of the trunk and stood up, hands outstretched, smiling, as if the rain and the height and the world itself were all hers. She had asked me for permission. I had tried to hand her hesitation. She declined. This is the first lesson we glean from hiking with our children in the rain that our anxious adult minds, wounded by the neon modern world so desperately need: to approach the world not with fear, not with anxious risk assessment, but with bright eyes and a willingness to test the surface for yourself. When we walk with our children, they lend us their healthy disregard for the impossible.

That was just one moment, one small tree on one small walk through our rain-soaked woods. There were more that day, more lessons, more glimpses into the quiet strength of a child who has not yet learned world weariness like you and I have. This essay holds those moments close and offers them to you as a kind of balm. If you’ve ever felt worn down by the damp gray ache of modern life, if you’ve ever needed a reason to keep walking, or a reminder that joy can still break through the drizzle, read on. There is more here and every Sunday. There is much more.