Clayton Voices: A Karat for a Carrot

Now that we are past the solstice, the days begin to grow blissfully longer; but due to the slant of the sun, the earth continues to cool in our hemisphere, plunging us headlong into winter.  This is a nice time of year for families to collect and kindle nature stories that will light the flame of a child’s imagination, hopefully for a lifetime.

Nature stories can be found everywhere: drifting by in the newspaper, swimming about on the internet, scampering around outside at this very moment in the trees.  Collecting these stories is a hunting/gathering activity suitable to our times, one that deeply nourishes the family spirit.  Here’s a story plucked out of thin air, right off the radio waves, that’s worth telling over again:

One day, a mother in Sweden was teaching her little girls the fine art of cooking, complete with composting, when she took off her wedding ring for safekeeping.  After all the cooking, teaching, and cleaning was over, she went to put her wedding ring back on – and it was gone!  Never to be found again…   …until…

Sixteen years later, after the girls had grown up, learned to drive and were busy starting their lives, the mother was harvesting root vegetables in the garden one day, when much to her surprise, up came the diamond ring fit snugly around a carrot!  Evidently, the ring had gotten mixed up with the compost pile and worked its way into the garden, where a carrot grew through the middle of it, just like a finger.  You can see a picture of the actual ring, and the happy mother and father, at this link on the BBC.

Every great culture has stories of valuable treasure to be found in one’s very own backyard, and telling these stories to spellbound children over a candlelit dinner, on a cold winter night, is like creating compost, treasure and a little bit of sunshine, all at the same time.   You may even be surprised at how much more food the kids will gobble up, with their eyes big and their ears wide open.