That special gift

If the moon is full...then the way is open for another adventure with your child.... The sport of watching migrating birds pass across the face of the moon has become popular and even scientifically important in recent years, and it is as good a way as I know to give an older child a sense of the mystery of migration. - Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder

I have two copies of The Sense of Wonder. One I bought some years ago for my personal collection while the second, the older of the two but newer on my bookshelf, was gifted to me by a friend. A naturalist and infamous collector, he makes it a point to seek out and buy every copy he can find of the older 1965 edition for one key reason: it has more pictures of kids.


And it's true. The 1998 edition, photographed by Nick Kelsh and pictured on this page, is a lovely little coffee table book with images of winter woods, leaves in full fall color, a close-up of rounded surf-washed stones, and a shot or two of an evening pond one could imagine swept by the same broom Emily Dickinson wrote of. But not many kids. To be honest, maybe this is the edition Rachel would have preferred. Linda Lear, in her introduction in this edition, cites a friend quoting Carson saying, "We plan for it to be rather lavishly illustrated with the most beautiful photographs we can find...."

I assume you know by now that neither of these editions of The Sense of Wonder were published during Carson's lifetime. The earliest version came out in the July 1956 Woman's Home Companion under the title "Help Your Child to Wonder." Lear relates that Carson wanted to improve the essay into an illustrated book, but after Silent Spring hit bookstores and subsequently the desks of chemical industry management, the last years of her life were spent defending her criticism of the use of "miracle" pesticides and herbicides on crops, roadsides, and the critters that live therein.

The first more kid friendly edition, photographed by Charles Pratt and others, was released in 1965, just one year after Carson's death. It, too, is "lavishly illustrated" with enchanting seasonal photography, but it seems to go beyond the picturesque to include a bare-chested boy peeking through the limbs of a Maine spruce, a couple of school girls messing around in the rain, and even the backside of a naked little kid toddling on a beach, hand safely held by an adult. Cute kids. In a book about kids.

Perhaps this post is really about the power and impacts of a thoughtful gift. I know I value my gifted copy of The Sense of Wonder more than the newer edition. It's special. And I realized today that I'll need two more copies of The Sense of Wonder for holiday giving this year: one for each of my grown daughters' families. With their busy lives of karate practice, homework, and school fund raisers, I want to be sure they hear the thoughts of an important American woman who encouraged moms, dads, and grandparents to be more zen while out in the natural world with kids, slowing down their own lives to experience the wonder of the natural world through the mindfulness of a child's microcosm.

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How about "natural" holiday gifts for kids? I know the ten-year old grandson is getting a decent pair of binoculars and a birding field guide. Maybe we'll even set up camp and watch the full moon during migration.

Any thoughts on or stories about great gifts? Anything you know that might invite a child to investigate the innards of a walnut shell, hunt for fossils, or wonder at the fragile strength of a Daddy Long Legs? Do tell! ;-)