Water Skippers

Watching water skippers on the creek upstream from Joey and Pedro’s pond, where they have a raft made of logs tied together and a stick to help push us around from one muddy corner to another. We are not coddled and watched over by parents as we hammer away at our tree fort and use a hatchet to trim off small branches. They aren’t hovering over us as we swim at the lake waiting for a near fatality. We are free to roam and show up in time for dinner. There are a few rules, no fires, no pointing guns (even fake ones) at each other, no playing on the farm equipment. That’s about it. Still they had to be challenged from time to time, secretively or in broad daylight so we could find out what it felt like to get our ass whooped by a freshly cut piece of kindling. I’m not traumatized by that. In fact the traumas in my life have a lot more to do with emotional wounds resulting from adults being unaware of their impact on the little souls around them. Heck our parent’s parents were even worse it that regard…. We are evolving and in some cases we may have evolved past the point of creating healthy safe-zones, to the point of preventing any mistakes, any opportunity to stumble and scrape a knee. In reality these are the way we learn what our boundaries are, learn what to test and what to accept as truth from the adults in our life.