Mazzy is a city kid. So is Harlow, although she doesn’t know it yet.
They can walk to a toy store, a pizza place, a library, a movie theater, and an ice cream shop all within a one block radius of our apartment. They can take a short subway ride to some of the best museums in the world. They have access to free summer concerts, the Union Square Farmer’s Market, the Central Park Zoo and the Gazillion Bubble Show.
But they do not have a backyard.
When they want to go outside, they’ve got a balcony, a small communal roof space and a playground two blocks away. On rainy days, when they need to run around, we utilize the hallway outside our apartment (much to our childless neighbors’ dismay).
They have never had as much access to the outdoors as they currently have at the summer house we rented for the month of August.
We’ve got a little over an acre in a long lot that stretches from the street to a creek out back, which empties into the bay. It’s not a landscaped or manicured lawn. It’s got patches of uneven grass and mounds of dirt with gnarled roots jutting out of the ground. It’s got tree stumps and wild flowers and the occasional pile of goose poop.
Our first night, we spotted a deer while we were eating dinner. We peered at him through the window and he peered back at us before running off and disappearing into the brush.
Every day we walk down to the dock and check out the rising of the tide. When it’s low we can see crabs crawling through the long tangled grass, schools of minnows swimming by and the shell of a horseshoe crab bobbing up and down at the edge of the water.
Mazzy is in heaven. The kind of heaven only an acre of land with fifty foot tall trees can provide.
Those trees have become a playhouse, a toll bridge, a command center, a space ship, a castle and the parameters for the island of Sodor, all within one day. Every time I turn around, Mazzy has devised a new game or is pretending to be something else in somewhere new.
Yesterday, she pretended the path of stones leading to the side entrance was a river and she had to jump from stone to stone without falling in. She introduced me to the concept of “tree bark” like it was the first time I was noticing it too, and told me very seriously that her “job” was to pick off the green moss growing on the side. She gathered a bouquet of leaves, set them up on her art table and traced each one of them on paper with a crayon, with no prompting from me whatsoever.
She points out bugs, gathers dandelions, runs after butterflies, and brandishes sticks like she’s defending her territory.
At night, I wash Mazzy’s filthy bare feet in the sink and brush leaves out of her thick tangled hair as she tries to wiggle out of my grasp. I tell her not to itch her bug bites. I picked two huge splinters out of her foot that she got from the weathered wood porch outside the backdoor, while she screamed her head off.
The great outdoors is not without it’s drawbacks.
This morning at 6:30am, while Mazzy and Harlow were eating breakfast, we noticed geese congregating on the lawn by the dock. After three weeks here, we knew that meant they would all be taking a ceremonious dump on our property.
Mike said he was going down there to scare them off and Mazzy asked to ride on his shoulders.
I wish I knew what a magnficent sight it would be to see my daughter riding my husband’s shoulders into the morning mist with thirty geese swirling above their heads, flapping their massive wings to flee our yard towards the water. THAT would have been a picture worth more than all the museum memberships in Manhattan. A spectacle that beat anything I saw at the Gazillion Bubble Show.
Mazzy might be a city kid, but she is fearless out here. Wild and free.
I will miss that once we are safely back in our goose-poop-free apartment.
Ahhh you’re getting a taste of where I live and where I’ve always lived.
I grew up in the country – on a farm, 15 miles from the nearest town (which consisted of a grain elevator, gas station, a bar, and a couple of houses). I dearly treasure my memories of country living. I’m raising my daughter in the “city” – a town of about 60,000. I’m still a country girl at heart, always will be, and I see my daughter blossoming into a city girl at 19 months old. She doesn’t like to be dirty or how grass feels on her bare feet. Hopefully, I can teach her the beauty of both worlds – living in the city and visiting Nana and Papa’s farm.
I think it is great that she gets the best of both worlds!!!
I feel like I have the best of both worlds. I live in Oklahoma, but a city in Oklahoma with over 300,000 people. We live in the middle of the city with huge building on the outside of our neighborhood. My husband and I both work for big companies.But we have a hug yard and in less then 10 minutes away we can be at a farm with cows. I still find it hard to beleive that there are alot of people that have never seen a cow in real life. We go to the farms and get fresh food all the time. My daughter will be both a city and country girl.
Mazzy is so cute it’s seriously ridiculous! That hair! And what kind of camera do you use? Your photos are always so gorgeous.
You know you have to tell us where you found that green dress right.
We live a short walk from our tiny library and mini mart. We have sidewalks and streetlamps but are surrounded by hop fields. The “city” is a 15 minute drive away. But it pales in comparison to Seattle, our closest (2 hour drive) big city. I grew up on a military base in a huge city, remember our outings and field trips. I don’t know if either is better than the other. I would love to experience living in a city for awhile but enjoy country living but enjoy country living too. But NYC is one place I want to visit sometime in the future. I’m glad you all got to experience the joys of a summer backyard.
I am pregnant with my first child. I can’t wait to introduce him to all things natural and wonderful. Your blog today has made me miss the curiosity of my youth – I look forward to living it again through my son’s eyes.
My three year old boy is the most outdoorsy of the bunch. Of course, all my boys love digging in the dirt and playing pirates in the trees. Perry, though, spent our entire road trip this summer on a mission to collect as many different sticks between Colorado and Arizona as possible. Some were swords, some boomerangs, some guns, some were digging sticks, and some were throwing sticks. Sticks, sticks, sticks! While his brothers were swinging and sliding on the playground, or playing with their grandparents’ dog in the back yard, he was wandering the edges in search of sticks. His world ended every time he had to get back in the car or go in the house and leave his treasures behind.
I’ve often said that if you took away Lil’ Bit’s toys – her play kitchen, dollhouse, Legos, toy trucks, Thomas figures, doll babies, all of it – she’d be perfectly happy playing with dirt and sticks. Where I liver, we’re surrounded by nature – sometimes more than I care for. And as a city girl at heart, I often miss living in a more urban setting, but I also can’t deny the joy of watching my daughter discover the great outdoors and all the imagination that comes with it.
Splinters… Make a baking soda/water paste and apply it generously to the area with a splinter in it. The surrounding skin will shrink up and push the splinter out – no pain for kids and no headache for mom! 😀
These memories will be wonderful for your daughters! Living in the city will make the smaller “great outdoors” trips that much more meaningful than if you lived out of the city full-time. I’ve grow up in Florida and visited the north during my childhood. Seeing the mountains and feeling the cold air is so much more fun if you don’t live there full-time and have to drive those mountain roads (slick with ice) every day.