Today as we walked along the trail running the ridge of some unnamed stream that flows to the Occoquan, my eye was drawn to each small island of green poking up through the brown leaf-litter. Holly, wild ginger, rattle snake plantain, bluet, those I recognized. I listened for the birds calling in the trees, too: robin, pileated woodpecker, common flicker, chickadee, cardinal, tufted titmouse; I heard them.
There's something about being outside that makes me want to name what I see, but that has not always been the case. It wasn't until I was 18 or so and spending time with my aunt, who in her kitchen had a picture window and a bird feeder outside it, that I even thought about all the different birds there were. On the table by that window, my aunt kept an Audubon guide and a pair of binoculars, and by the end of the week, I was kind of hooked.
I still had no interest in plants, though. When naturalist friends would point them out to me, I usually dismissed the identification with a joke. Interrupted fern? They should have called it, "fernus interruptus." Bwa ha ha, right?
I'm not sure when that changed. Maybe when I started hiking with people who knew less than I had learned by poking fun at my botanist friends. All of a sudden? I was the expert, and I realized that I liked knowing what was what, even if I had to find out for myself.
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