Worms

What better way to spend a Saturday morning than running around barefoot, hanging laundry, sipping coffee, and digging up worms.  Neva and Frances were delighted at the ease with which they were found and Frances took great joy in their squirminess.  They were held, studied, carried, tossed, swung in the rope swing and, okay, there may have even been a bit of nibbling.  How grateful I am for this magical time of childhood, with nothing for the girls to do but explore, wonder, and delight.

It made me think of one of one of my very favorite books The Sense of Wonder by the wonderful Rachel Carson, a beautiful reflection of the importance of children experiencing nature.  

"If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.  The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.  Once the emotions have been aroused--a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love--then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response.  Once found, it has lasting meaning.  It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put her on a diet of facts she is not ready to assimilate".