PARENTING

Shall We Go Out To See The Worms?

GiaB prompt #14- being in nature

The sunlight would stream into the room, and the toddler with her new legs would wake up. After breakfast, she’d tug at my kurta, and demand to be taken out. In the street outside, she would bend on her haunches and look closely at the worms that came out when it rained.

Squiggly, wiggly and perfectly disgusting worms. I couldn’t imagine what she saw in them, and she was too young to explain. Passers-by would look at the little girl, and at her mother, me, who had the leisure to take a walk with her each morning.

Then she fell sick, and didn’t want to walk for a week When I cajoled her into a walk, after she recovered, I asked her, Shall we go out to see the worms? She nodded, happy and curious, and I knew That my baby was well again.

It is there, in the cool morning of a day after the rains at night, that I discovered that the smell of wet mud, and the earthworms, the happily exploring toddler, and her delighted steps, these were memories my inner eye had to capture, but fortunately, I had a Nikon back home!

In the prompt of the week, Victor Sarkin asks us to explore a fiction, or a non fiction article of 750 words, or a poem of 30 lines with nature as its central tenet, where our relationship with nature is the premise of the story.

I’d like Alan Asnen, Feelix Peelix, Vicki Abbott, Steve Sathue, John Gruber,and Betsy Denson to participate in the challenge. You have an entire fortnight to dream up your story.

Don’t worry if you aren’t in nature much. In India, the only people in the cities who experience nature are traffic policemen, vegetable vendors and gardeners.

That said, you can’t evade nature entirely, either, and I’m sure that you’ll come up with a memory that fascinates you. I spend most of my day indoors, but I managed to find a nature memory, and so will you.