One of the reasons I think I’m not ready to have kids is that I wouldn’t be able to answer their questions about life basics.
Why is the sky blue, where do mountains come from, etc.
I don’t know why I know so little about this stuff. I went to high school, college, grad school (twice!). I have read books, sometimes even for fun.
But when confronted with nature, the real kind, still and un-narrated, I can’t explain any of the whys or hows.
I spent Christmas this year in Madeira.
It’s island off the coast of Morocco that, for random historical reasons, is an autonomous region of Portugal, like a little European Hawaii.
I knew very little about it before I visited. But now, because I have been there, I am interested in it.
It was discovered in the early 1400s, uninhabited, a spike of volcano that wriggled up out of the Atlantic, then spend the next 5 million years getting ground back down to sea level.
This process is apparently ongoing. Most of what’s sticking out of the water is hills. The old joke among the locals is ‘The only flat surfaces on Madeira are vertical.’
The climate is perfect for growing sugarcane, so the early years were spent terracing the hills, creating stairstep cropland, cultivating it one stripe at a time. All the agriculture is still done by hand.
Sugar crashed when Europe discovered Brazil, the Caribbean, slavery. Madeira converted its little sugar plots into little vineyards.
That worked til the 1890s, when a disease wiped out all the grapes (think Irish potato famine, but this time the victims were warm-weather alcoholics).
The economy crashed, most of the island emigrated.
Nowadays they still grow crops—those are banana trees down there—but mostly they cultivate tourists, people like me who fly all the way here for the weather and the pictures and the differences.
This narrative, the path Madeira took here, it makes sense to me, it’s full of people and businesses and a big economy that goes boom one century and pfffft the next.
That’s the story of everywhere, basically.
But then I bike to the top of a mountain on this very same boom-and-pffft island and I am holding my boyfriend’s hand and we are looking together at a bunch of lava rocks sticking out through a beach and I realize that I have no idea why some rocks get ground into sand and others don’t.
And then I’m thinking that if I was at the top of this same mountain, holding my son’s hand instead of my boyfriend’s, this is the shit he would ask me about, the rocks and the sun and why is the water that shade of blue and how many stars are there in the sky and I have no idea how to answer.
Or maybe he won’t ask me, maybe we’re not the kind of society where we do that anymore. Maybe he’ll stand on that mountain and look at that beach and use his free hand to whip out his little tablet or whatever and he’ll read the Wikipedia entry about lava and we’ll stand there and neither of us will say anything.
And maybe that’s better for both of us. I can’t explain how anything works when it’s really small or really big or made of rocks, when it can’t tell me how it works itself.
But hey, if he ever wants to know how the island’s GDP is calculated, I’m right next to him.
What a highly original way to send a series of postcards telling us all we need to know about Madiera! I`ve learnt so much and in such an entertaining fashion, I don`t even need to know any more about the geology of the place. Great post!
I’ve had this struggle (children/no children). And then my brother generously contributed two solid nephews to the grandkid section on my parents’ mantle and the good-problem-to-have started to resolve itself. . Thank you for your posts!
Don’t worry about answering questions. Just instill in your child the same wonderment for nature that you have. You’ve been doing fine without knowing why the sky is blue. So will he.
Children require simple answers and you’ll come up with them. And, in their simplicity, everything will be clear, not just to the child, but to you as well. Great photos. Thanks for teaching us about Madeira.
I have four kids and all you can be sure of is they will ask you things you don’t know. Happens all the time. The beauty of kids is you can say ” I don’t know” and they are fine with that. Beautiful pictures. Thank you for sharing.
I love that last picture… Beautiful!^_^
What a highly original way to send a series of postcards telling us all we need to know about Madiera! I`ve learnt so much and in such an entertaining fashion, I don`t even need to know any more about the geology of the place. Great post!
I’ve had this struggle (children/no children). And then my brother generously contributed two solid nephews to the grandkid section on my parents’ mantle and the good-problem-to-have started to resolve itself. . Thank you for your posts!
Very beautiful, thank you. Wikipedia can teach the why or how. YOU teach him awe. You already know how to do that.
What a lovely tour! I’d recommend national geographic videos if you truly are anxious about explaining this type of stuff
Beautiful pictures! Now I want to visit. 🙂
Don’t worry about answering questions. Just instill in your child the same wonderment for nature that you have. You’ve been doing fine without knowing why the sky is blue. So will he.
Children require simple answers and you’ll come up with them. And, in their simplicity, everything will be clear, not just to the child, but to you as well. Great photos. Thanks for teaching us about Madeira.
The colors are better than food.
I have four kids and all you can be sure of is they will ask you things you don’t know. Happens all the time. The beauty of kids is you can say ” I don’t know” and they are fine with that. Beautiful pictures. Thank you for sharing.
Honestly, if you were my parent, the fact you were just there would mean you were were pretty cool to me.
NICE pictorial…really enjoyed those.
Those are some lovely shots up there. God’s glorious makings at their best in photos! 🙂