Bug Bites, Brambles, and Burns

What is gained in the discomforts of spring

By Ryan Anderson, Stakeholder Communications Manager at the American Conservation Coalition

By late May, the children have returned to the good, wild green places in earnest. The long confinement of winter has fallen away from them piece by piece until suddenly they are no longer lingering near the window or asking permission to wander but instead disappearing outright into the field and the forest with a slam of the screen door and baskets in hand. They return scratched by brambles, freckled with sunburn across their noses and shoulders, dotted red with bug bites around their ankles and eyes. Their hands smell of crushed ferns and wet loam and brook water. A mother may wince a little at the scratches while rubbing salve on sun-warmed shoulders before bed, but deep down we recognize these small discomforts for what they really are: signs of a childhood properly underway.

The fiddleheads have risen thick along the brooks now beneath the frothing canopy, and the ramps have spread their broad green leaves through the damp places where the snow lingered longest. The morels whisper where water flowed a month ago. Families step carefully through the woods with children hurrying ahead along the path, baskets swinging at their sides while they search the forest floor with the seriousness children reserve for treasure hunts, and salamanders, and bird nests. We kneel in the dirt beside them and teach them how to harvest lightly, how to leave enough behind for next spring and all the springs to follow, how to recognize the places where the fiddleheads grow strongest and where the ramps should simply be left alone.

These lessons matter because conservation begins long before a person ever uses that word.

It begins when a child learns that the woods are not merely scenery, not merely a setting for their stories, but a living place that feeds us, shelters us, scratches us, stains our fingers green, and silently requests care in return.

The season itself seems determined to push children outward with no regard for consequence. They run barefoot through the dandelions with abandon, heedless of the bees foraging lazily among them. They ride bicycles down dusty roads until twilight and return smelling of sweat and warm earth. June bugs throw themselves against the screen doors at night while peepers sing out from the low wet places, and the children beg to stay outside just a little longer in that dusky lavender fade-light. These are all but mere heralds, however, to the crescendo of May; Memorial Day approaches and with it comes the unofficial beginning of everything good and green and vital in American life: fishing poles leaning against garages, grills dragged out into backyards, canoes untied from rafters, gardens planted in hopeful rows. The red, white, and blue bunting flaps amid a backdrop of green while the whole country seems to exhale and step outdoors again, ever led by the wise children who knew it was time before the calendar granted us adults the permission we too often seek. We now endure the thorns and bug bites and sunburns gladly because they arrive alongside all the freedoms winter withheld from us.

Modern life increasingly encourages the opposite sort of childhood than this green feast accompanying the brambles, the burns, and the bites. A sterile childhood. An indoor childhood. A childhood scrubbed clean of dirt and weather and risk and wandering. We are told to keep the children comfortable, shaded, entertained, supervised, sanitized. Yet anyone who has watched a child burst out the door on a warm May morning knows instinctively that this cannot possibly be the whole truth of a good life. Children yearn for the forest and the field. They want the brook and the mud and the bugs and the low branches that tear at their sleeves. They want pockets full of strange rocks and hands stained by berries and knees grass-green from skidding around the yard. They want to disappear into the woods for an hour and return carrying treasures they barely understand themselves and we adults have forgotten the meaning of. Their love for the natural world emerges from participation. From bug bites, from brambles, from long evenings outside while the light lingers over the far hill.

Perhaps that is why late spring feels so restorative to us adults as well. The children draw us back into patterns we have neglected, forgotten, lost. We slow down enough to notice the wild strawberries flowering at the field’s edge or the scent of damp pine rising from the forest floor after rain. We begin measuring the day by birdsong and sunlight again rather than crises and headlines. The children remind us that the world is still tangible, still seasonal, still alive beneath all the noise of modernity. Their scratches and sunburns become proof of something larger, evidence that they are forming the sort of attachments from which all good stewardship eventually grows.

Yes, a child slightly bruised, bloodied, and battered by May is often a child fully alive.

A child growing in fidelity to place.

The bites fade, the scratches heal, the sunburn peels away by June. What remains is familiarity with the land, affection for their little particular plot, confidence moving through the verdant understory of the natural world. These are the beginnings of a marrow-deep commitment to the good green things that raised us, that which we grew alongside. Conservation grows from that fertile soil more reliably than anywhere else. It does not grow first in committee hearings or classrooms or campaigns, but in the long grass beyond the porch where children wander out into the season and return home carrying the red litany of the whole living world written on their fair skin.

Ryan Anderson is the Stakeholder Communications Manager at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC) and the author of Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. Follow him on X @OldHollowTree.