Boulder-Tinker

This is my Tinker Creek - it's the Boulder River (facing upstream, so as not to foul the view), on a little piece of land in the Absaroka Mountains, which have been and always will be, my own little piece of paradise. I've been thinking about this place for most of Dillard's book, because I come here every year to spend as much time as possible, and even at the end of six days in a place I've been countless times, it never feels like enough. There is always more to see - and I wonder what I would really see if I was there for a whole year, laying in the grass in my aspen grove or pressing my face as close to the frigid water as possible to look at the little organisms this place teems with. Dillard has really made me think about how I view things, from the walk I take to school everyday to the button I've kept in my pocket like a worry stone for however many years. I'm reminded slightly of Uptaught - in the way he asks his students to write about that one object (I think it was one side of a penny?) for an hour. I feel Dillard unconsciously asking me to really examine what's happening around me so closely, from the little bugs in the potting soil to the way the birds come back after winter. In a way, it seems almost disgraceful that I haven't been doing these things.

This is my cousin Emily. I think she was in fifth grade when I took this picture, which makes her a seventh grader now (junior high, that dangerous age). There's a line from my recent reading that I can't get out of my head, and it's this: "When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male mouse. Only children keep their eyes open" (Dillard, 91). For some reason, I started thinking about Emily, and how as the youngest, she's the only one left of us that still wants to go lay in the wildflowers with me, or who is absolutely delighted to go pick wild raspberries along the road (even if it's been a dry year and we're hard pressed to find any). It's been our tradition since I was in fifth and before that - go to the wildflowers. She still has her eyes "open" to these little things - things that all the others don't want to do. The thing is - so do I. And I'm almost a decade older than her. So if only children still keep their eyes open - does that still make me a child? I struggle so much with this concept - I'm the age of the "adult" in
society. I should be grown up. But does my appreciation of these childlike things...lessen that idea? I'm not sure how to say any of this - but if giving up my appreciation of the smaller things makes me an adult, I don't know that I want to be one.