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Age 4 or 5. It’s spring and my family is walking through Goll Woods, a nature preserve in Ohio. Some parts of the preserve have dirt paths carved through them, but it is otherwise pretty close to how it would look if humans weren’t around. There’s no gift shop or bathroom. Just a gravel parking lot and a few trails that loop around for walkers. “Stay on the trail” my father said. It would be so easy to step off of it to see the new flowers in the woods, but I listen to him. The woods are one of the prettiest things I’ve seen in my short life, all covered in flowers after a long winter.
Age 7. We live in Wyoming now, and it is summer. The mountains are so filled with snow that we generally can’t drive up there between mid-autumn and mid-spring, but our summer day trips up there are mild and beautiful. I’m standing next to a crystal-clear lake in this memory and looking at the Rocky Mountains looming above the water. There is still snow up in the mountains even this late into summer, but there is no more ice or snow on the lake. It has melted, although the water is so ice-cold you wouldn’t want to swim in it even in July or August. We have a picnic lunch by the lake, and the world feels peaceful and happy.
Age 11. We have just moved back to Ohio because my father had just been hired to be a pastor there. It was a decent-sized church for a rural place, about 200 people or so. I’m thrilled to live close to my maternal grandparents again and am running around their farm to see what has changed since our last visit. The wooden swing down by the creek is gone now, probably because either the wood or the rope was too rotten to be safely used anymore, but the barn cats are still prowling around, Grandma’s garden is growing nicely, and there are a lot of pretty flowers growing in the woods and out behind the barn where my grandfather doesn’t mow due to how many old pieces of farm equipment have been stored there. In this memory I keep running until I’ve inspected every bit of the farm that children are allowed to visit alone there.
So many of my happiest memories from childhood involve nature! How about all of you?
1. A full-body massage from a professional masseuse.
I’m once again wishing I could peek at everyone else’s answers before this post is published!
I’ll give you an illustration of one of my biggest pet peeves and then explain why it annoys me so much because it involves a few different behaviours that often come bundled together like the world’s worst “Buy One, Get One Free” sale.
The Ooze was a Christian message board created by Spencer Burke that existed about 20 years ago when the Internet was quite different from how it is today. It was a gathering place for all sorts of people who were trying to come up with better ways to live out their faith. I met some incredible people there, including my spouse!
Linda Fetter was my best teacher. She’s almost certainly retired or maybe not even alive anymore based on her age when I first met her and how many years it has been since I graduated high school, therefore I think it’s okay to mention her by name here. I have never seen anything about her online, so I doubt she’ll ever know about this post even if she is still with us.
Since you can’t do that, I’m going to give two answers.