FigmentEnrichment of Their Imagination

Our local nature center invited families to their outdoor play day, an occasion designed to allow children to explore new worlds through interactions with the natural one. As Beni and I often joke, we, as a family, don’t differentiate between formal invitations and the more casual ones (e.g., throwaway lines, habitual mentions, byproducts of courteousness): you ask us, we’ll (likely) be there.

And so we made our way with some friends to a place that is becoming more and more unfamiliar to more and more of America’s youth. (Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, calls this obliviousness “nature-deficit disorder.”) We’re doing our best to buck this trend, and we hope families and individuals alike will join us in reconnecting with environs neither concrete nor electronic.