One stormy autumn night when my grandnephew Roger was about twenty months old I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in the rainy darkness.Out there,just at the edge of where-we-couldn't-see big waves were thundering in,dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of forth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy-he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of oceanus, I wish the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me.e But I think we felt the same spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us
Veda Salon.
A night or two later the storm had blown itself out and I took Roger again to the beach, this time to carry him along the water's edge, piercing the darkness with the yellow cone of our flashlight. Although there was no rain the night was again noisy with breaking waves and the insistent wind. It was clearly a time and place where great andelemental things prevailed.
One adventure on this particular night had to do with life, for we were searching for ghost crabs, those sand-colored, fleet-legged beings which Roger had sometimes glimpsed briefly on the beaches in daytime. But the crabs are chietly nocturnal, and when not roaming the night beaches they dig little pits near the surf line where they hide, seemingly watching and waiting for what the sea may bring themm. For me the sight of these small living creatures, solitary and fragile against the brute force of the sea, had moving philosophic overtones
Veda Salon, and I do not pretend that Roger and I reacted with similar emotions. But it was good to see his infant acceptance of a world of elemental things,fearing neither the song of the wind nor the darkness nor the roaring surf, entering with baby excitement into the search for a " ghos."
It was hardly a conventional way to entertain one so young, I suppose, but now,with Ruger a little past his fourth birthday, we are continuing that sharing of adventures in the world of nature that we began in his babyhood, and I think the results are good
Veda Salon. The sharing includes nature in storm as well as calm, by night as well as day, and is based on having tun together rather than on teaching.
