Meadows

By Peggy McManus

June 2026

I love a good meadow and had the good fortune to survive a great deal of time in them as a child. 

My vast experience with meadows came about because of my parents, who regularly headed out to the country to forage for food. They knew all the best places to look, and the far majority of them were in or near a meadow. A stand of birch trees or the charred remains of a forest fire were great places to find morels. Hike up a mountain on a warm July day, and you could find huckleberries if you knew where to look. The one thing all our great foraging spots had in common was a meadow.

Back then, most parents of young children avoided foraging. I think they feared slipping on wet pine needles and rolling down the mountain with a toddler strapped to their back.

Such doomsday thoughts did not deter my parents from foraging. Their solution was to plop the inconvenient toddler down on a blanket in the nearest meadow and go on with the day’s activities. My parents reasoned that this method resolved any pesky child safety issues. Besides, they didn’t have a choice. We needed the food.

Since I was the inconvenient toddler, I spent many hours in meadows, confined to a blanket, with only a few crackers, a bottle of water, and a toy or two. There I would stay until my parents and my sisters, the Trolls, had gathered enough shaggy manes, morels, or huckleberries to feed us for a while. 

“Whatever you do, Piggly Wiggly,” Dad said. “Do not leave this blanket. If you need us, start yelling, and someone will come running.”

I don’t think I ever yelled for them. I was too afraid of who might come running. It could be one of the Trolls, or a pack of wolves, which would be almost as bad. Instead, I learned to care for myself and would roll up in the blanket to block the heat of the sun or the wind on cooler days. I learned to love being cocooned in my blanket and nodding off to sleep, listening to the humming of the busy meadow bees and smelling the wild daisies. 

One day, I asked Dad if he thought there were any monsters in the meadow. He said he didn’t think so and that any creatures that were in the meadow “probably” wouldn’t hurt me. 

“You’ll probably be fine here, Piggly,” he said. “But if anything bad does come along, play dead.”

Whenever I heard rustling in the surrounding grass, I froze in my best dead-body pose, even if it was "probably" just grazing deer. But sometimes it was hard not to send a crazed SOS shriek up the mountain, especially if a big hairy spider stopped by. There’d be no playing dead if that happened. Instead, I’d run feverishly around the perimeter of the blanket until the eight-legged demon was rattled enough to escape back into the grass. I hated visits from spiders, even if they “probably” weren’t poisonous. 

I learned to be one tough toddler on that blanket in the meadow. That’s just how it had to be if I wanted our family to have food to eat.

One summer, I was finally old enough to forage with the rest of my family. It soon became evident that I was not cut out for the job. I couldn’t seem to keep my pickings in my basket. I’d trip over a log or catch the basket handle on a wayward branch, and my pitiful bounty would go flying. As a result, Mom and Dad released me from my foraging duties, and I retreated to the nearest meadow. I was no longer confined to the blanket and could play in the meadow to my heart’s content.

I had a decent collection of Tonka trucks and a kid-size baking kit back then, and I started bringing them along whenever we went out foraging. As soon as I was set loose in the meadow, I was off to find the best available puddle, where I spent hours making mud pies and building roads and stick bridges for my trucks. 

At lunchtime, the rest of the family reappeared, and Mom unpacked a spread of bologna and butter sandwiches, Shasta pop, and gorp. If you don’t know what gorp is, you’ve been missing out. Nowadays, people call it trail mix, but that’s typically a healthier version of what we had. Ours was a blend of salted peanuts, pretzels, jellied orange slices, M&Ms, raisins, and Cheez-its. Of course, we all went for the M&Ms first. Everyone but Mom, that is. The jellied orange slices were her gorp food of choice. She said they satisfied her sweet tooth but weren’t so good that she’d want more than one.

After lunch, Mom packed up our picnic remnants while Dad came to the puddle with me to sample my mud desserts. Depending on the quality of the mud, there may be peanut butter bars, haystack cookies, or a variety of tasty morsels for dipping in chocolate sauce. 

“Nom, nom,” Dad said, pretending to enjoy a mud, er, chocolate-dipped gooseberry. “That was delicious, Piggly. You are a gourmet chef!”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said proudly. “Here, try a chocolate-covered ant.”

When I finally tired of playing in the mud, I walked through the meadow, leisurely gathering a bouquet of daisies for Mom. She had taught me the names of many of the native plants, and I recited them to myself as I walked: milkweed, dandelion, clover, snapdragon, thistle. Watch out for that one. I had learned the hard way not to tangle with thistle.

I never knew what I might find on my meadow walks. In summer, butterflies and chubby bumblebees were everywhere. If I were lucky, I might even find a woolly-bear caterpillar. They are fuzzy little guys that are black with an orange stripe around their middles. The length of the stripe will tell you if the coming winter will be short or long.

“The woolly bears say we’re going to have a long winter,” I said conversationally on one car ride home. “I think this means I’ll be needing a new winter coat.”

 “We’ll see,” Dad said. “I think one of your sisters may have an old coat you can use.”

An old, used Troll coat was not what I had in mind, but I’d save that argument for another day.