Long time no see.

I’ve been living in the woods for the last few years. We moved out of Toronto and bought a place surrounded by cedar trees, with a stream fed pond and a rocky creek out front, and honestly it’s exactly as idyllic as it sounds. Most of the time. When our neighbours chainsaws start ripping I know that spring is coming soon. Seriously though, I was sitting by the pond recently and it reminded me of how magical living here can be. And the thing is that sometimes I forget that I can just go sit outside – with or without my laptop – and just be there. There are still days where I might not go outside – but even then, nature is always just a glance outside.

We haven’t been travelling. I especially haven’t gone anywhere. But I’m finding that a lot of my need for novelty and newness can be fulfilled by walking in the woods and discovering a new plant. It’s oddly satisfying. Maybe it’s not exciting to everyone, but for me, spotting a spring ephemeral – especially a new-to-me one – taps into the same delicious feeling as finding a new restaurant or waking up in a new city. Weird, but good. I’m always noticing, and that feels nice.

A few years ago I took the Ontario Master Naturalist Program at Lakeland University and that just enhanced my wonder with the natural world around me even more. Bob Bowes, who leads the program, has this boundless and inspiring curiosity about the natural world, and I found that my interests expanded beyond any one specific topic as a result of the program. Now it shows up in a variety of really random and wonderful ways.

When I break new ground into my garden space with my shovel and get stopped by rocks – I am reminded of how the hill is actually part of the Peterborough Drumlin Field, and instead of being annoyed (okay, sometimes I’m still annoyed), I think about how at one time these hills were formed beneath the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet, and how there is so much deep history and wonder in that – some of these rocks have been buried for thousands of years and here I am messing them up to grow some beans. I’ll be honest, had never thought about drumlins before, if I even knew what they were, I can’t remember.

Then I switch to my pick axe and keep digging.

It’s amazing how being a nerd about nature can just creep up on you too – driving through Ontario I kept seeing plants I didn’t recognize, seeing birds I didn’t know, and as time passed, and I realized that it was information I wanted to know. I wanted knowledge. I remember announcing it to J during one of our family drives. Little home education projects like One Small Square – where you measure out a small square of outdoor space and just observe it closely over time – gets you looking closely at blades of grass, moss, tiny bugs, soil and dirt, and how a small space can change over time. Who are they? What is in the dirt? What kind of lichen is that? What is lichen anyway? What a cute patch of moss, I wonder what kind it is. Over and over again, questions, and seeking answers.

Then at some point I could walk through the woods and identify many of the things I was looking at. I could hear a bird and tell you who they were. On the other hand, I could now also identify all the different species that were invasive or potentially harmful to the forest and I’ll admit, that kind of sucked too.

What do you mean that cute little puple periwinkle plant with the shiny little leaves is choking out native species in thick mats? What do you mean that bellflower is an agressive and relentless spreader? What do you mean that tree with the berries isn’t really a good source of nutrition for birds, but does use them to proliferate everywhere and is hard to remove? And I wasn’t sure if that was the right mindset either – to approach the outdoors with a friend or foe kind of attitude, and that took me down a path of looking at Indigenous research that encourages looking at why invasive species is there in the first place, and finding a way to use them versus just looking at removing them (though I still remove many of them anyway.) I don’t have all the answers, but I’m tapping into my own boundless curiosity, and that feels like something good.