Bowed Before the Winds

Children love to use new, strange words. Sometimes, when we stopped to rest on field trips, we would have a "Nature Spelling Down." In the schoolroom, whenever we came across a new and grand-sounding word connected with our Nature-study we would write it down on the board in a special corner, where it could be left undisturbed. Since "Teacher" had a pair of binoculars that the children were free to use, that word headed the list, with other such words as "petiole," "deciduous," "stomata" and "lenticels" of plants; and "mandibles," "primaries" and "nape" of bird lore. Since they were not required for their regular spelling lessons, most of the children thought these words were fun and vied with each other in being first to learn them.

Always, on our field trips, each child watched out for his particular tree, and there was friendly rivalry over who counted the most specimens of "his tree." One sparkling, autumn day, with goldenrod and chicory lining the dirt roads, with the maples aflame and Lake Erie in the distance blue as the sky above with great, white, billowy masses of clouds, we walked three miles to see a hundred-year-old "stump fence" made of the upturned roots of white pines.

Again, in spring, we walked five miles to see a dogwood in bloom, for dogwoods are rare in that northern hill land. But the children had seen the picture of the flowers in Keeler's Our Native Trees, a well-thumbed volume by the end of the school year. The American elm, with its graceful, vase-like form, was the first tree that the children learned to identify at a distance. So large was this scarlet oak that we thought it must be at least three or four hundred years old. As we sat and rested under its shade, we tried to imagine all that it must have seen happen.

Throughout the year we visited the same woodlands and isolated trees, to know them in autumn when the color parade was on; in winter, when they were bare, and, again, when they wore glittering mantles of snow or crystal; in spring when they were in bloom. And during all seasons we learned to listen to the winds in the trees, and found that Nature has a different tune for her winds, whether they go creeping softly or roaring through her various kinds of trees. We watched to see how the different trees reacted to storms, too, contrasting the rugged oak, which was tortured and buffeted by them, with the supple birch, which "bowed before the winds."