It happened again yesterday. Dire warnings. Flashes in the sky. No rain. Not even thunder. There’s drizzle this morning. That’s good. But no drenching downpour. That’s good, too, actually. Two of my kids and two grandkids spent the night outside by a creek, hunting arrowheads, communing with nature. They come by it honestly. They had two poor parents who took advantage of the state’s parks for vacation and recreation.
Their dad, me, spent the evening listening to music and communing with nature from a different direction. I was in the backyard of a friends house with other friends. A previous commitment. It was one of those occasions where I wondered what my late wife would have done. Was I missing something by not going with the kids to sleep on the ground. Hard to say, although I know my body no longer tolerates rocky beds as well as it once did.
Of course, I’m hardly an absentee grandpa and I plan on going with them on Memorial Day for our annual trip to the Nueces. We go with families of longstanding, to a place of longstanding, where our kids now have their own kids and the kids of the owner of the land where we camp now run the place. Continuity. We’ll bring our binoculars and look for birds and look at the wild things. And we’ll sit in the river, and try to help the little ones know the feeling of the land from whence they came.
