Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World

Chapter One: First Places

By Richard Louv On Jun 19, 2026

Chapter One: First Places is an excerpt from Richard Louv’s new book, Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World. Find out more about Richard work, including the Children and Nature Network, a nonprofit partner of Kindred World. This chapter is reprinted in Kindred’s Solstice Issue 2026 with permission from the publisher. See citation below.

Chapter One: First Places

Lying in a crib, waking in silence, you notice the moth on the amber wall, or the face approaching. You lie still and watch the dust motes fall in light filtered through stained glass or a yellowed pane marked by long-ago raindrops. You sense the light behind the light.

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And then a doorway opens to the world beyond, the streets and fields and woods and alleys and schools. To water and sky.

This imprinted First Place travels with you for the rest of your life. It serves as a kind of ark, carrying animals, plants, the curve of hills, and the rise of dawn above the trees.

It might have included a backyard garden, a circle of trees at the end of a cul-de-sac, an urban park, a path deep into the woods. There, you might have inspected a dung beetle as it rolled manure across a field, or the sun-flowers reaching for the sky, or the old toad on the sidewalk watching you with red-rimmed eyes, or a crawdad drifting in the current of a creek, or ants moving the tiniest of leaves like foot soldiers on the way to the front.

Being new to the world and closer to the ground, children notice such details and create stories about them, or they paint or draw them.

Some of us, the lucky ones, hold on to that magic. Maybe you had a special spot in nature when you were a kid. Where every leaf felt new, and even now, you can close your eyes and be there again. Others spend their lives searching for a place in nature. Sometimes, they find it.

My earliest memories are of my grandmother’s Victorian house, built by my great-grandfather in 1889 in Independence, Missouri. My grand-mother, Edna Mifflin Streeter, was born in 1884, just nineteen years after the assassination of Lincoln. Her husband was born in 1863, when Lincoln still lived. In her forties, she gave birth to my mother in 1924. Nine years later, he died. Great elms grew in the front yard and eventually towered over it.

My grandmother was a kind and quiet widow who took in boarders during the Depression and World War II. Later, she took care of me when my parents were at work. I don’t recall her ever saying anything unkind to or about anyone.

Her house and neighborhood were filled with real or apocryphal ghosts.

One day, my father was gardening in my grandmother’s yard. Sitting under a pear tree, I watched him dig into a small earthen mound. Shards and broken arrowheads practically spilled out. The mounds were probably middens left by the Osage people as they traveled through the area long ago. Later, I imagined them traveling as spirits.

A forbidden ravine at the end of the road held its own stories. As a four-year-old, I was drawn to its edge. Far beyond my allowed boundary, I peered into the green darkness below. My collie, Banner, was by my side. To avoid sliding down into the ravine, I reached out for his mane of fur.

At that hour, the ravine was dark and silent except for a bird or insect call — whether complaining or celebrating, I couldn’t tell. I absorbed the details of that place but did not want to know them all — perhaps because I noticed the smell of garbage and saw the rusting automobiles hidden among the green-and-black foliage. Or maybe because I could not see the bottom. Down there, trees and bushes fought for sunlight, their branches tangled in gnarly ropes. In my imagination, these were Tarzan swings. Banner wanted us to leave this place. I could tell by the sound he made: a huff.

Perhaps the vines were wild grape, rooted woody lianas that climbed the trees to reach sunlight in the canopy. The leaves are said to taste like grapes. Or maybe they were moonseed, easily mistaken for wild grape. Despite the threatening darkness, I wanted to climb down there and fol-low a path into other worlds. Then came a rumble and groan of a freight train riding the tracks on the far side of the ravine. Lights from the train pulsed through the vines, and I felt the cool air pushed up from the dark-ness below.

Through the years, we live in newer places, and if we’re lucky, we bond with them. All these places become the geography of our lives. But there is only one First Place.

When I was six, my family moved to the edge of suburban Raytown, Missouri, eight miles south of Independence. With Banner, I explored the fields and woods behind our new house. As we ran through the high corn, he raced ahead or circled me.

In the early summer, the leaves and ears of corn were green and sticky and prickly. By fall, the stalks were brown and brittle. No accident that so many of Stephen King’s chapters take place in cornfields. Anything can happen. In a cornfield, at least for a child, the world is taller, the way for-ward less clear, the sounds muffled.

In the clearing of my woods, a rivulet of water flowed through the marsh. When the water reached the trees, it grew into a creek. I would venture into the trees to sit on the creek bank and watch the minnows, frogs, and water spiders do their dipping and sliding dance.

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Thinking of that place is like remembering the back of my mother’s gentle hand.

In the mid-twentieth century, there began a generational disconnect from nature. Even then, only a handful of kids in my neighborhood spent much time in the woods. In those years, I had no idea how lucky I was or knew that so many kids my age had no chance to climb a tree or sit in the clumped grass of a clearing in the woods. This is not to say that cities contain no natural habitats, but they compete with traffic noise, exhaust, and thousands of other distractions.

I missed out on the advantages some urban kids enjoyed. There was no easy bus ride to the American Museum of Natural History or Brooklyn’s Prospect Park or, for that matter, Kansas City’s Swope Park. Such places could also have ignited an intense interest in nature. But for me, nearby nature offered a doorway to the world of the senses.

One day, I stood alone in the clearing. At the center was a marsh with islands of clumped grass. Long blades pushed up and out from the center of each clump. I judged each clump to be about the size of a sitting African lion, its mane rising two feet in the air. Not knowing its real name, I called it lion grass. With my feet in an inch of water, I turned and faced the cold spring wind. I stood still for a moment, leaning slightly forward. And then I threw myself backward into one of those clumps of grass. I felt like I was falling upward.

Settling into the blades, I lay there for a long time listening to the oak limbs sway. Watching a blue sky streaked with white and gray, I felt lifted on the wind, up and out of the lion grass.

Growing up, I often experienced what the ecophilosopher David Abram calls the “spell of the sensuous” or what Henry James referred to as the “palpable present-intimate.”

When I climbed a tree, I could hear the wind fluting through the thin, long crevices in the bark. Looking down, I would see patient Banner looking up at me.

With legs and arms around the trunk and feet stepping on branches, I shimmied upward. In the wind, leaves whipped against my eyes and cheeks and ears and neck. I would study the bark and its colors and investigate the furrows populated by nearly transparent spiders. As I climbed higher, the tree groaned and swayed. I would sit up there for an hour or more. I would put my ear to the bark and try to hear those little civilizations.

These were the moments when the earth stopped.

In the clearing of the woods, a rivulet of water flowed through the marsh of lion grass. When it reached the trees, it became a creek. I watched the minnows, frogs, and water spiders do their dipping and slid-ing dance. Long ago, mountain lions or cougars disappeared in that part of the country, but I dreamed of seeing one. Or even a bobcat. Oaks and cottonwoods lined the creek and the edge of the woods.

I remember every scent, every brush of the air and the feel of the earth beneath my feet or between my fingers. Adults tend to focus more on the big picture. Kids are closer to the source of things. Even today, I can feel that lion’s mane holding me, my fingers gripping its fur, and in those brief moments of remembering, I am again part of everything.

When I was eleven, our family moved again, across the border into Kan-sas, to a house near a lake, and during the move, Banner was hit by a car and killed.

It was a gray year. Sometimes in winter, I would get off the school bus, head down to the shore, and walk across the ice toward my house. Later, in the spring, I would follow the shoreline until the water narrowed into a stream and then a creek. Carp swam in the shallows and rolled in the sun in flashes of gold. Shadows moved beneath the surface. There were snakes in the swamp and in a pasture that ran along the creek. Beneath rocks and logs, I would find smaller brown snakes with gold rings around their necks.

One afternoon, a girl my age got on the bus wearing a coat with a faux-fur collar. She was full of life. I was thirteen, and my first thought was, She’s like a movie star. Over time, I got to know the girl. I told her about my dog Banner and about the woods and the stream and the ring-necked snakes. She became a friend. Wanting to show her the place I loved, I asked her to go there with me one day.

She was not someone who often stepped off the sidewalk, at least not this far.

We walked through the hills and stopped at a barbed-wire fence. The shadows of clouds slowly moved over the trees and across the pasture. We could see horses down there, bounding, playing, their backs curving. The wind was blowing; the grass was bending. I looked for one of those clumps of lion grass and did not see any.

We stood there for a long time, both of us looking across the field to the woods, and she finally said, “I think I get it.”

“Get what?” I asked. “You know,” she said.

And then we walked all the way home under the bright sun that had opened on that pasture.