They say hindsight is a wonderful thing and in my opinion, never more so than when you become a parent. Growing up on the family farm, a good 20km from the nearest shop, I would often wonder what it would be like to need milk and just pop down the street to grab it, rather than to the cow shed to milk the old milking cow. Never would I have dreamed then that I would one day be bringing up my own son and daughter in the suburbs of Melbourne, with every imaginable convenience at our fingertips.
I am yet to decide who is the better off – myself or my children. While McDonalds trips were a rare occasional treat when we travelled the two hours to the nearest city when I was young, at just two, my son can already point out each McDonalds sign we pass and yell “chippies” excitedly. And I may have had all the space in the world to play in while my son is confined to his backyard of our rented home, but never the convenience of choosing from a world of organised sports to take part in, or a quick trip to the beach or the museums and sights of the city.
So it was when I decided to introduce my son to the wonders of horticulture, I realised just how different his perspective on the world would be. We found a pot to plant his two tulip bulbs in, and then as I tried to cast my mind back to doing the same thing as a child, I remembered a handful of stones off our long driveway stones in the bottom of the pot were the key to proper drainage. But, where were we to find a handful of stones in our perfectly manicured suburbs? We walked and searched to no avail and eventually had to settle for some small pieces of broken brick we found under the house.
Then I began to worry, how can a boy grow up without stones? And my mind wandered onto other things...mud, a boy needs to make mud pies, where will we find mud among the concrete jungle? What about day-long adventures of finding treasures down the back paddock or sailing boats in the channel. It hit me like an axe to the wood chopping block that everything I had taken for granted in my farm childhood would be unknown to my son. His paddock adventures would be walks along concrete paths, with strict supervision due to those city dwelling unsavoury characters us parents are always warned about. Daily mail deliveries, garbage trucks, traffic, neighbours...all these things would be his 'norm'....
~~~~(Fast forward six months)~~~~
It wasn’t until I was hanging the washing in the strong country wind upon my very own slightly leaning Hills Hoist clothesline that the words from my three-year-old truly confirmed we had made the right move.
“Look Mummy!” he squealed excitedly, looking down at his gumboots he had previously rarely had the need to wear.
“My boots are hiding in the grass!”
“Thank you Mummy,” he said with the most satisfied tone I had ever heard him utter.
Unsure of what the connection was in the wild imagination of a boy in his backyard I replied “Thank you for what, Leo?”
“Thank you for my new house Mummy with grass that hides my boots.”
Simple as that - grass that hides his boots. Forget your expensive battery operated toys, you can keep the swimming pool and the five days of karate followed by music class, no need for massive play centres or McDonalds around the corner. Yep, all this boy has longed for is a backyard big enough to spend a whole day in, interesting enough to find snails and sand and versatile enough to accommodate a three-year-old’s imagination.
I love watching Leo and his little sister Delilah playing in their new yard through the laundry window. Oblivious to my supervision, they excitedly run, well rather, Leo encourages Delilah to run, from one amazing discovery to the next.
“Lilah-Lou!” Leo yells.
“Lilah-Lou! Eo found a liz.”
Lilah-Lou is the name Leo has made up for his little sister, none of us are exactly sure where it came from, but we all agree it is incredibly cute and will probably stick for a lifetime. A “liz” is a lizard and “Eo” is how Leo refers to himself, always in the third person like he is the protagonist in his own amazing magical journey of his own life. As if it is all too amazing and beyond comprehension to really be happening to him.
As Leo carefully examines each piece of bark in the garden looking for the “liz” and Lilah hangs on his every movement eager to find what her brother is so excited about and tries in her own clumsy way to sort through the dirt and sticks invariably getting distracted by the feel of the new textures, and of course tastes some soil and chews on some grass, I stand in our very own laundry and look out knowing that somehow, despite the stress and huge worry over whether we had made the right life decision for our family, somehow, I reckon things would be ok.
Finding interesting little somethings in the grass.
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