On Loving Where You Live

Mothers everywhere should take their children outside. This is something Charlotte Mason implores us to do in the early pages of Home Education. She envisioned us being out with our children in wide open spaces, for long stretches of time. This sounds wonderful in theory to most mothers, but if like me you live in a big busy city, this vision might leave you feeling more frustrated than inspired. Yet the reality of city life was not lost on Mason, she suggested that a train ride out of town with a packed picnic was well worth the effort. When encountering these ideas from Mason my thoughts went something like this, ‘I love this! And yes, we could reschedule some things to make time in our week for at least one long stretch, but where would we go?’ While there are many truly beautiful outdoor destinations in the big city of Johannesburg, visiting them is always hindered by two questions; how long will it take to get there? Is it safe for me to go there by myself with my 3 young children?

In Leah Boden’s book Modern Miss Mason, she writes about nature study taking shape in her home-school and describes a park near her house that was, for most people, simply a place to walk through. Embracing her philosophy of decidedly loving where you live, her park became a destination. A place to wonder at and observe the natural world.

In reading this, I realised I have a similar park within walking distance of our house - albeit with a typical South African spin on it. Being situated within our gated community it offers the level of safety I was looking for, with the trade-off being an electric fence and power lines running the length of the park. While there are some beautiful, established indigenous trees, the majority of the park is covered in weedy grass, and the play equipment is not very well maintained. No sweeping views, no long distances to cover, no rocks to climb over, and certainly no gentle stream to play in. For us, this was just a place to walk through, or visit for a short while. I never imagined we could find enough to do there for any lengthy stretch of time.

Nevertheless, we decided to love where we live too. We started taking an occasional lunch there, doing a few narrations and just enjoying a change of scenery within the day. In doing this our eyes were increasingly opened to the fact that while hemmed in by walls and wires, we were very much surround by things alive, ever growing and changing.

One day, we set off with a small amount of food and a flask of tea to last us the usual short visit. We invited some friends along the way and some of the children soon ran off to hunt for a new pet. After finding two different caterpillars and a beautiful leaf insect, something else caught their attention. A mole-rat mound.

They started digging. Gladly this was not a manicured bed or lawn. Considering the limited damage they could work using sticks in a forgotten corner near a palisade fence, I let them dig. A palpable feeling of wild discovery overtook the children as they slowly pieced together an entire network of mole-rat holes. Multiple entrances, dead ends and steep drops were unearthed. Sisters held hands underground. They worked away, and the time rolled on.

Realising we’d been there for three hours, I laughed during a quick phone call to the mom of our friends (‘Still at the park?’ was her confused response). When the rest of the day’s plans pulled us away, no one was ready to leave. I surveyed the ploughed-up ground and saw that we would need to return the next day with an actual spade to neaten up a bit. What we didn’t know then is that mole-rats are tidy creatures, and that when their burrows are disturbed, they will work to push the sand back into them. When we returned the next day, there was almost no evidence of the previous days’ earthworks.

We later entered this discovery into our notebooks. A map of the burrows was drawn from memory and after confirming with a mammal companion guide, the African mole-rat was added to a child’s individual catalogue of the world. And if that wasn’t wonderous enough, by the next morning one of the captured caterpillars had transformed into a chrysalis.

I know it won’t be like this every time we visit, and we will still climb in the car in search of wide open expanses for long stretches of time, but this marvel of a time would not have happened if we hadn’t tried to get out just a little bit more determined to love where we live.