I watched my two youngest grandsons play in a puddle, stomping their feet in a joyous dance of giggles and smiles. I thought of another youngster, then a bit older than the boys; her ability to find joy in her play seemed to be endless. She was at her grandmother’s bungalow, looking across the road called the “back lane,” over the stream where she hunted for pollywogs to the side of the hill that rose up from the lake. She had spent hours by that stream, still more hours exploring the flora and fauna on both sides of the water but never venturing beyond. It was the beyond that captured her at fancy. Somewhere, on that hill, if she could climb it, she would find the castles, the princes and princesses, the wee folk that she read about. Her imagination soared with anticipation.

So it was during those summers when I was given the freedom to imagine, to perhaps reconnect with who I was when I was born, when we were one with the world, as the poet says:

 …trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy

That same poet, William Wordsworth, tells that too soon the world interferes, molds us into what it wants and we lose that innocent bond with the universe, being redefined by what we need to connect as we are directed. There is no longer a “oneness” but rather a cautiousness, a restraint, a separateness which compels us to find oneness again.

 How do we preserve that innocent connection that sees all life, all things as one, the essence of being, able to create fairies, castles, forts and such with just a thought while at the same time how to we prepare the growing child for the realities of the world in which he or she will live? Fire will heat and fire will burn, friends will warm as well as break your heart, some will harm you, some will protect you, love but be wary…on and on as the years pass and the child grows toward his mortality. That safety, the peace of childhood departs.

I remember being that child who spent hours building a village with twigs and small stones in the sandpile behind my grandmother’s bungalow. I wore part of a curtain and a daisy chain headdress when I became the princess who lived in the woods behind the village who dreamt that the fireflies were tiny fairies who come out at night to dance over the strawberries and I remember my father telling me that I couldn’t wander into the woods behind my grandmother’s house without an adult … but why? Don’t touch the fire! Don’t walk on the roads. Don’t talk to strangers. …on and on … the lessons becoming more and more so that that early freedom was less and less.

Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,”admittedly a mouthful and sometimes a bit difficult for the modern reader, makes the point that there was a time when, as a child, we possessed a link to reality substantially different from that which we experience as adults and that lost link has value.

Our culture molds us of necessity, directs that which we bring with us and leaves that wonderment of childhood behind. Still there are times when the air is right, a song conjures a memory, when the light moves shadows, when we feel, connect with others, empathize and we can be that innocent for a while, a respite from the must do and should be to treasure the things that are not important in the “world,” the place where the artist, the poet, the mystic peeks through.

I am not a poet, but Wordsworth is and I share another part of this wonderful “Ode:”

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

There are childhood memories, of course, but there are also puddles and grandsons and the unfolding of lives that add another kind of richness without equal.