Nature or Nurture

 The eternal argument which is never settled.   I remember discussing it during Teacher Training over fifty years ago.   My son and I fell into discussion about it only last evening.

My son reminds me so much of my first husband - my son's father.    With both parents practising musicians it was inevitable that he would grow up playing an instrument and I suspect he didn't so much choose the Double Bass as drop into a gap in the school orchestra (he went to a Cathedral School near to where we lived) and have a wonderfully sympathetic and inspiring teacher who everyone called 'Uncle Bertie'.

I was always a reader/writer and have a love of literature - especially poetry and books about Natural History.   My son writes very well and writing now that he has retired has taken over every spare moment when he is not being a Carer for his wife. I have to say his poetry and his writing in general has long surpassed mine - his use of language is now often 'out of my league'.

But my goodness me his character, his decisiveness, his 'no nonsense' approach to life, his enthusiasm for filling his life with things to do (ham radio, astronomy, keeping in touch with old friends) is his father through and through.

Me?  I have my mother's insistence in almost excessive tidiness.   When my main morning carer, J, who is the same, goes I get the first exercise of the day as I walk round checking that everything is in its place.   I can't relax even if a cushion on the settee is out of alignment!!

But from my father I have a love of the countryside, of nature in general and a love of poetry.   And from them both I get a complete and utter love of the hare.  My dad loved the hare for its fearlessness, its speed and its sheer beauty.  I hardly dare tell you that my mother loved it for an entirely different reason!  Jugged hare was her very favourite meal.  She loved preparing it,  she loved cooking it slowly in the fire oven (coming home from school I could smell it cooking as I turned down the drive at the side of the house. ) I hated it and always had something like a jacket potato instead.  My parents would savour it and tell me that it was healthy to eat food which came from the open countryside.   Much better than what my mother scathingly called 'shop bought'.

I love the hare still - I have books on the hare, a bronze hare cleaning its paws sits on my hearth, another smaller one leaps across the top of my bookshelves.  They remind me of my childhood in the open fenland countryside of Lincolnshire where hares were plentiful.  Years ago I wrote a poem on the hare - I leave you with it:

The Hare.

Dew flirt,

Mysterious, wild thing of the ploughed earth-

birthing in the furrow and

living for the free, open ground.

Tales of mystery and magic surround you.

How little we really know you - the wild one.

'Familiar' of the goddess Freya as the black cat

to the witch.

You stand tall, tipped ears erect,

 meet my eye with your fearless gaze.

Then you are gone, leaping and flying

through the air in one gigantic burst of speed.

Sleep with your eyes open if you will.

Dance to the rhythms of time

as you have always done.

Shun taming.

Stay free.  But

give me that occasional glance

to gladden my heart.