On Reading to Grandchildren

I like to see this boy running down by the water.

A happy memory is seeing him laying on the flat
rocks that are above the waterline of the stream,
his legs dangling over onto the bank and reading.

Glen and I are reading the same book right now: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013). 

In the book she joins Indigenous Wisdom with Scientific Knowledge and The Teaching of Plants. 

Another case of  holy trinity, three in one.

Glen told me that she would be speaking in a webinar and invited Rebecca and me to join which we did.

When we signed in at the right time, the spaces full even though we'd registered. We received an email the the session would be taped and up for 30 days. I watched it last night. I had to laugh when the commentators said that they were overwhelmed with the response: 10,000 people had registered. I suppose that's why Rebecca and I didn't get their first.

We're overwhelmed with crowds, even a virtual crowd.

Betty is wanting to learn to read.
Here is her highland dance medal.
She also dances the path between her cabin
and grandmother's house

I've been reading the Kimmerer book. I wanted a taste of her personality and her voice. 

I'm already a hundred pages into the book. 

One night I had on a warm fire, my feet up and then this page-turner on my lap, that is if a person thinks a lovely walk on a forest path is a page turner.

There are thoughtful conversation about the science of plants. Kimmereer also puts forth the idea if you talk to plants, they might talk back to you. Having already experienced this, makes the read like having an old friend beside me, quietly experiences everything that I am experiencing.

I may have told you before that a few weeks ago, Glen was asking to borrow Rebecca's book because he'd found a copy of it at his house. He thought it was hers but she was sure her copy was in Victoria. Come to find out ,what Glenn had found was the copy that Janet had bought for him as a gift, stashed away, and then the gift was yet to come out. Kind of like finding your own Christmas present before Christmas.

Alice can run like the wind.

I wonder if she will know where to
find the wild strawberries this June?

I wish I had my own copy of the book. Rebecca must have enjoyed it for her copy is annotated with  pens and line drawings. 

Glen says he's going to read the chapter on strawberries to Piper. 

I hope Alice and Betty are over at his house when he's reading that those words to her.

Here's how the chapter, “The Gift of Strawberries” starts.

I heard once from Evon Peter Gwich’in man, a father, a husband, an environmental activist, and Chief of Arctic Village, a small village in northeastern Alaska --- introduce himself simply as “a boy who was raised by a river.” A description as smooth and slippery as a rock river. Did he mean only that he grew up near its banks? Or was the river responsible for rearing him, for teaching him the things he needed to live? Did it feed him, body and soul? Raised by a river: I suppose both meanings are true - - you can hardly have one without the other.

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields...

And Robin Kimmerer  goes on to describe the fields of wild strawberries, in detail, such a beautiful meditation. Rebecca’s copy of the book is highly annotated. If I want to have this book read to my grandchildren, I will have to get my own volume.

Arta