A two-and-a-half-year-old sees everything for the first time. Not almost for the first time, not nearly for the first time. Actually for the first time. This distinction matters more than it sounds.
The mushroom on the verge is a genuine mystery. It is not a thing whose name she knows and whose function she understands and whose presence she therefore passes without much thought. It is a thing that has appeared in the world, and it requires investigation, and the investigation takes as long as it takes, which is longer than you think you have until you slow down enough to stay.
Look. A fairy house.
This is not a metaphor. This is a hypothesis. The mushroom might be a fairy house. The hypothesis deserves serious consideration. We should look at it carefully to see if there is a door.
The Education
People talk about what you give a child. What you teach them, what you pass on. I taught her some Welsh. I taught her to look both ways. I taught her the word for hippopotamus in three languages, which she received with the seriousness it deserved.
What she gave me was harder to name and took longer to understand. She gave me back the world.
Not a different world, not a better world in some theoretical sense, but the actual world, the specific one, seen as if for the first time. The way light does a particular thing in the Cwmcarn Forest in the late afternoon, the light broken up by the canopy into moving pieces on the path. I had walked that path before she was born and I had not seen it, or I had seen it and it had not entered me the way it entered me when I was holding her hand and she stopped walking and looked up.
What's that?
That's the light coming through the trees.
She considered this. She looked at it for longer than I would have looked at it alone.
It's dancing.
It was dancing. I had walked that path a hundred times and I had not known that the light in the Cwmcarn Forest in the late afternoon is dancing.
The Hills
There is a particular quality to the hills above Crosskeys. Not dramatic hills, not Snowdonia, not the sharp upland drama of the north. These are valley hills, rounded, ancient, the hills of the Silurian, of coal measures and old forest, green above the line of the houses and then darker green and then the ridge, the trees along the top standing black against whatever the sky is doing.
She was interested in what was on the other side of the ridge.
This is a question I had not asked since I was a child myself. What is on the other side? Not in a practical geographic sense, I knew what was on the other side, but in the sense that she meant it, which was the sense that interested her: what lives there? What happens there when nobody is watching?
She had theories. A castle, possibly. Probably horses. Maybe the trees talk at night when we're asleep.
I find myself, still, when I walk up above Crosskeys and reach the ridge and look out over the far side, thinking about what might happen there when nobody is watching. This is her thinking. She left it in me. It persists.
What Remains
She recalibrated me. That is the plain version of it.
She adjusted the resolution at which I saw ordinary things, and the adjustment did not reset when she left. I see the things I see at a higher resolution than I would have seen them without her. The dancing light in the forest. The mushroom as a genuine question. The possibility that something interesting is happening on the far side of the ridge.
This is what a child gives you. Not only the particular love of them, which is enormous, but the education. The ongoing instruction in the first time. The reminder that the world is not a thing you have already fully seen.
She was an exceptionally good teacher. I was not always an attentive student, but I caught enough.
I carry the lessons.