Daily Prompt: Childhood Revisited - No Forget it, I went for a walk

Sure, you turned out pretty good, but is there anything you wish had been different about your childhood? If you have kids, is there anything you wish were different for them?

Oooh No, if I have done this prompt once, I have done it 10 times, so let’s leave it to the newbies to tell us all about their childhoods. I would just add that next Monday my son No. 2 is getting married (for the first time). It will be the first wedding in the family so I will ask him in twenty years to perhaps write this prompt and let’s see what he has to say. In the meanwhile I rest my case, I have other things to do.

In the meanwhile the weather has brightened up in our country and it seems that the monsoon season has passed onto somewhere else (India?). T-shirts with short sleeves, and perhaps even sleeveless are now sufficient and even the sweat pours from my brow as I cut my path through nature, using my machete. The grass is high and all sorts of different flowers are now showing.The grass is being mowed down or the cows have been turned into the fields to eat what they can find.

“Makes a change from that dry hay stuff” Bluebell told me as she was munching away in the field. 

Even the milk now tastes different, but I didn’t tell her. She never did forgive the humans for drinking the milk actually reserved for her babies.

I saw that the opium harvest is progressing. Yes, the poppies are showing their luminous flowers in the gardens and the local population will be looking forward to a nice opium harvest in Autumn. “What did you say” it is not allowed, it would be dealing?. I naturally meant this in a figurative sense of the word, we Swiss have enough to do with laundering our money. No, of course not. The poppy heads are dried and used for decoration. In the meanwhile the flowers in the gardens can be admired and photographed. I think I might plant some poppies myself this year, although I first of all have to harvest my hemp plants which take up quite a lot of space when they grow tall and strong. Yes, there is nothing like having your own herbs in the garden.

I noticed a new horse in the meadow that I had never seen before. Mr. Swiss told me it was a stallion. What a clever man he is, for me it was just a horse. Even the horse was participating in devouring the grass. Yes it is a combined effort in the Swiss countryside, all the animals and doing their best to help the farmer keep the meadows tidy.

It also seems that the Swiss Alps are creeping closer. I, of course, took a few pictures of these Alps, you never know if they might disappear some time. Most of them are already hollow, being used by the Swiss army as storage places for ammunition and tanks etc. If Switzerland is attacked by the others (for example Liechtenstein) we have places to hide. After all the mountains are there for something. It was only a few years ago when the Swiss army were having a practice to see if their weapons were still in working order and by mistake set fire to a few fields over the Swiss border in Liechtenstein, so who knows they might be working out a plan of revenge.

Anyhow here is my prize suspicious photo of the Swiss Alps taken on my walk from a field somewhere in the state of Solothurn. As the crow flies they would be about 150-200 Kilometers away, not counting climbing up and down.

Daily Prompt: The Natural World

Describe your first memorable experience exploring and spending time in nature. Were you in awe? Or were you not impressed? Would you rather spend time in the forest or the city?

Photographers, artists, and poets: show us NATURE.

It was a long time until I saw my first field of wheat. I only knew it from the nature books and pictures, but to actually see and touch wheat heads, was unknown.

I did not grow up in the desert. I grew up in East London, my forests were old buildings, streets smelling of damp dust after rain. The only plants growing were those where seeds found a space between paving stones. Of course there were trees, big trees that no-one really noticed: they were just there. There was no-one that could give me a name for a tree. We had parks with bushes and grass. I think they were just there to compensate for the monotony of houses and apartment blocks to make a green surface in between.

Of course I had contact to wild nature. Nature always finds a way to show people “hello, I am here, and I will take over when you are no longer there”. In our area of London nature had to fight for its right to survive, we humans helped a little by having a war, World war II. Many areas of my part of London suffered from bomb damage and whole streets disappeared, were obliterated by bombs, leaving a flat area for nature to take over.

They were the playgrounds of my youth. Grass, weeds, even small bushes soon found their way and we youngsters had fun, finding strange insects, imagining forests, where anyone would say it is just weeds and bugs. We had nothing else to show us what the meaning of nature was. After a while, when London slowly recovered from the damage of a war, whole groups of houses were collapsing almost on their own. Windows did not fit their frames due to the regular shakes received from the heavy traffic. Doorframes no longer fit the doors and gradually the old houses were dying, never to be brought to life again. The houses were emptied ready for rebuilding.  Our playgrounds now had empty houses to explore. The small gardens left behind had not only weeds, but real flowers. Sometimes if you were lucky you would find a straying rose bush, perhaps even Iris plants.

We had a small garden in our little attached house. My grandfather once planted iris, a yellow variety. One day many years later I read that that colour was a special variety. We also had a hedge rose which occupied one wall of our little garden. We had a privet tree. Now and again mum would buy a packet of mixed seeds. The main thing was everything did grow. Part of the yard (the name garden does not really qualify) was just stones and coal grit from the coal bunker we had in the yard. Sounds romantic I know, but coal fires were a normal way of heating in winter in those days gone by. The coal would be delivered in sacks and put in the bunker. There was a small flap that mum or dad would open and take a few shovels of coal for our fire.

Part of the yard was quite fertile and I remember someone giving me three small strawberry plants from school. I planted them and they started growing. I was as thrilled as an eight year old could be. Unfortunately one night someone jumped over our garden wall, probably running from something somewhere, and trampled them flat. That was the respect shown to nature in the East End of London at the time. I loved planting things and seeing them grow. We did not have the money for fantastic plants, but just a packet of corn seeds, nasturtiums or daisies did the trick for me.

Once a year we spent a week at the seaside for our holiday.  It was a place called Herne Bay where I saw my first cornfield on the South coast of England. We were staying at a caravan site, one of the cheapest ways to have a holiday at that time. There was a field just outside the entrance to the site with these long stalked plants bearing seedy heads.

“What’s that dad?” I asked.

“That is corn I suppose” answered dad. Even he was not sure, although he had done a tour of Europe at the cost of the English government, dressed in a uniform. He had seen a lot, but probably did not really savour the blessings of nature at the time, although I believe he did realise that grapes were a valuable plant in Italy, being the source of wine: but that is another story.

Today I live in Switzerland in the country, where the fox and hare say goodnight to each other. There are cows at the bottom of my garden, bats fly when darkness reigns and crows, swallows, and red kites populate the skies, leaving some place for the blue tits, robins, woodpeckers and starlings. I always felt that the stork left me in the wrong nest as a child. I have now found my nest. I love every slug, snail, spider, dragon fly and ant that sleeks and creeps in my garden. Even earwigs and caterpillars survive. I just pick the ones up I don’t like and throw them into another field where they can carry on with their insect life. All nature’s creatures survive at my hands. Not that the place is full of creepy crawlies, I just remove them to another place. I admit I kill flies, but they never seem to have a population problem.

I even have two apple trees growing in my garden. One I bought which gives me a wonderful harvest every year and the other I planted from a seed which is now taller than the one I bought, but up to now has never had an apple.

I am now a country girl oldie and enjoy every breath of the country air I breathe.

Creative Challenge - Nature

“Nera, you have been sitting on that damp earth for at least an hour. What is so interesting?”

“Mrs. Human, if you ask a feline a silly question, you will get a silly answer.”

“What is so silly about that question?”

“Mrs. Human you have hung a food tray in front of our delicate feline noses for the birds and I am waiting for a bird to arrive within food range.”

“But Nera, they arrive all the time for food from the bird house.”

“Mrs. Human I mean my food range.”

Another one of those pointless discussions with Nera, the chief cat, but I persevered with my human logic.

“Nera the birds are tabu for you and your fellow cats. They are not a supplementary source to your usual natural diet of vitamin packed pellets.”

“You can keep you vitamin packed pellets, nothing like a nice little crunchy bone covered with juicy meat. You humans have no idea. It is a feline’s nature to chase birds. You cannot imagine the triumphant feeling we have when we feel the bird between our paws.”

“Nera I can only imagine the feeling that the bird has being part of a feline meal. No, forget it.”

“Tabby, Fluffy come here, Mrs. Human is being illogical once again. She does not understand the basic laws of nature.”

Tabby came running across the garden. When Nera calls, her words are to be obeyed. Fluffy awoke from his sleep and was ready to obey Nera’s commands.

“Are you having human problems?” asked Tabby and Fluffy. “Is Mrs. Human doubting the laws of the feline nature once again?”

“Felines, I am not doubting any laws, I am just telling you that birds are not a supplement to your healthy and plentiful diat.

“I don’t remember Bast feeding his team in the corn chambers on pellets Mrs. Human” said Tabby.

“The felines were in the corn chambers for a reason. They kept the plague of vermin under control so that the corn was kept safe for human consumption. The felines were there to kill the rats and mice, which is their nature.”

“It is also our nature to kill and eat birds Mrs. Human” said Fluffy.

“Well said Fluffy, you are learning very well. You are now apprentice first class.”

“Thank you Nera, I like a morsel of poultry now and again.”

I gave up. 

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