That is my least favorite abbreviation online. I don’t even have to exaggerate to explain that it took me a full 10 minutes to figure out what the hell that meant.

“For what it’s worth”

Can’t we just agree that any time you say something it is with the understanding that the person doing the listening will decide what it is worth?

Sorry.

Consider this post like that abbreviation, but without the annoying part where you have to figure out what I am saying. My work, or more accurately, the potential for work, took me to a very beautiful place today.  Whether it will turn out to be a place I return for work is undecided, what is certain is that something I learned there will stay with me.

Close to 150 years ago, and yet the immediacy of the message was staggering. Don’t discount this and assume I am a rabid lover of nature, because while I like to go for hikes and spend hours on end outside, I do not like bugs. I am not fond of many creatures, I do not yearn to life off the grid and leave behind things like online shopping, getting my hair colored and room service. I do however, in these words written so many years ago, reacquaint myself with the promise of time spent out of doors.

I remember the feel of wet grass whispering against my bare ankles on nights during that first summer with Sean. I smell the way air changes between darkness and dawn. The idea of losing myself along a path and closing my eyes to feel the sun pressing through limbs to kiss my face. There is no imitating the sensation of one’s body spending hours breathing nothing but fresh air or the flutter of excitement when you catch the clap of a breaking twig from a distance and spy the creature running to hide.

This sign made me look at this structure and know that I want to build it, if not in this form in some other fashion so that our girls know what it is to have a base from which to go and explore. They can run to and fro as they discover and create new outdoor adventures.

I cannot change the fundamental shift in what it is to be a child now, but I can make decisions about how as adults Sean and I will create opportunities for our girls. We can carve out ways for them to experience a childhood wilderness, a place that is unformed and unprogrammed, where their imaginations chart the course and their access to discoveries too great and too unpredictable as to have any competition from a remote.

I wish this for us all, for it really is worth a lot.